Love is a good place to situate our distrust of fake women.

A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.

You can get used to eating breakfast with a man in a fedora. You can get used to anything, my mother was in the habit of saying.

Madness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public.

Homer must have felt this pressure to come up with an epic poem that would sound totally new to an audience that had loved his previous best-seller.

I am kind of a curmudgeonly person, so I don't gravitate to groups or traditions, which is probably just pretentious of me.

There are different gradations of personhood in different poems. Some of them seem far away from me and some up close, and the up-close ones generally don't say what I want them to say. And that's true of the persona in the poem who's lamenting this as a fact of a certain stage of life. But it's also true of me as me.