In which the editors eat cookies (Thin Mints, specifically), play mad libs, and give Emily Barrett Browning what for.

Literary quotation is not like raisin cake. This, at least, is what Herman Meyer would have us believe, although it should be noted up front that he operates on a significant bias. If literary quotation were the same as raisin cake, his two-hundred-and-seventy-two-page work, The Poetics of Quotation in the European Novel, woulad come to [...]

Say your madras shorts are dirty and I hate those shorts
I could write
Love is why I refuse to do the laundry
or
If you love me, you should wear chinos.
It’s painting to avoid a conversation.
Like when you tell me the milk is sour, and then put it back
In the fridge, I might write an ode to [...]

When my grandfather came to this country, his cousins were in the furniture business. “Up and down all those stairs, that’s tough,” my father tells me as we walk out of a 99-cent store in Bensonhurst. “He didn’t understand why he would do that work. He had a trade.” These days, talk of my future over dinner tends to wander from Korea to LSATs, from the Dow to sustainable agriculture. At school, in the midst of Muir, my father calls to say, “You’re at Stanford with all those nerds, you know, engineers or whatever, who may say they know what they’re doing with their lives, but that’s Mars and beyond on the Starship Enterprise.” Sitting on my futon under a typewritten sign that reads No Talk of the Future Here, I tap the crust of microwaved tea off the mug’s lip and watch the fragments hesitate in the air like gnats.