A letter, handwritten. Dated 10/3/94 in the righthand corner. Written in all caps. Like I’m shouting at her. HI MOM! IT’S YOUR FAVORITE SON HERE. GUESS WHERE I AM AS I’M WRITING THIS? COME ON, GUESS! You don’t have to guess. I will tell you. I was on campus.

I was almost two, and it was altogether a more innocent time, when my family immigrated from Kyiv to Chicago. Reagan was the president-elect, and Disco Demolition Night in Comiskey Park only a few months in the rearview. In those days, my babblings came out in Russian, but, within a few short years...

I read Seamus Heaney’s North as a university student in 1997. At the time, there had been a number of failed ceasefires between the republican and loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, and the Good Friday agreement was not yet in sight. In North, Heaney finds a way through sectarian violence in a stunning series of poems centered on Northern Europe’s bog bodies...

Snowed in during a storm in January 2024, I found myself reading Byron. I was idle and concerned about early signs of dementia in my dad, and needed something to “withdraw myself from myself,” as Byron once proclaimed was his motive for writing. I knew and liked some of Byron’s shorter poems, and was familiar with his “mad, bad, and dangerous” persona...

A word and occasion like Thanksgiving might be worth pausing on, lingering over. It might help us think about our failures in language and in living, which, as Toni Morrison and many others have pointed out, are inextricably linked. Our language and our living. How we do language together as an element of how we do life together.

If I was writing about trash, I needed to investigate its history. The Covanta incinerator in Newark burns five miles from my house. Beside my office in Queens is the landfill buried under Flushing Meadows Park. I learned that the U.S. is the world’s largest producer of garbage...