Speaking in Tongues
On Don DeLillo
The artists of the Eighties acted fast. They had to: there would be no future otherwise. But in battling the retrograde Reaganite look of the System, they knew they were its bastards nonetheless.
Frank Guan
All articles by this author
Read More
March 24, 2016
Like Perot, who he resembles temperamentally, Sanders is wagering that he can win a rigged game.
End of the End of History, Redux
Maybe it’s best to be good at many things but great only at convincing people you’re great at everything.
Gone Guy
November 30, 2015
Ride the Lightening
A sonic youth grows old
Born in 1972 (or, as the back cover of his new book of poems puts it, “during the Nixon administration”), Michael Robbins experienced, growing up, a tremendous run of good luck. It didn’t have much to do with his immediate environment.
April 30, 2015
How She Got Over
On Ariana Reines
She stands at the center of her work not as a self but as a kind of cardiac impatience, as a vessel for materials bound elsewhere.
September 19, 2014
Green House
A Brief History of “American Poetry”
Divorced from all profound political engagement, the defiance of convention once associated with the avant-garde becomes itself conventional, the most efficient means of bidding up one’s price in a culture market made up of like-minded individualists
Nobody's Protest Novel
On Tao Lin
Poetry like this isn’t for everyone—no poetry is—and the lowercase typography and bare emotional content are likely to remind many readers of high-school poetry (their own, perhaps), triggering a squeamish antagonism that distracts from how, tonally, taken as a whole, these poems manage to be assertive without being overbearing and pitiful without lapsing into vanity, neither of which seems especially high school—or even college, really—to my mind.
Several episodes end with Tom burdened by enormous debt, and one ends with Tom in Hell.
