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 a halt after a two-page introduction—following, I would imagine, a new, more appropriate title page: The Poetics of Raisin-Cake Metaphors in Herman Meyer’s Interrupted Criticism.
To be precise, Meyer’s raisin-cake claim is really, at first, a …

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 grocery stores
Fluorescent promises of ten steaks for the price of one.
And in another book another wife has written
About her husband who refuses to take off
His madras shorts and replace the milk.
But she never uses …

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.

I’ve lately been rereading some of my favorite short stories, from a collection by Richard Yates called “Eleven Kinds of Loneliness.” In “No Pain Whatsoever,” Myra visits her husband Harry, who has been quarantined in a tuberculosis ward for more than four years. Normally, Myra takes the bus to visit Harry, but on this Sunday she has been driven by three friends, including Jack, her lover, whose wandering hands in the backseat of the car mortify Myra’s sense of decency and propriety. Inside the hospital, thin and haggard, Harry is …

This summer I spend three weeks doing political science research in Dakar, where I don’t know a soul and not a soul knows me. When someone asks, I confess, Yes, this is my first time in Senegal. (I visited Mexico, once, when I was eleven years old.)

I pass hours in the courtyard of my hotel, which has everything I need and could be possibly entertained by in Africa. A wireless internet connection, which they call wi-fi in French, so that it rhymes with leafy or beefy. A bar and a barman, who meets me with a beer at my preferred beer-drinking and wi-fi surfing table, near the hanging vines but not so near that a mosquito could lurk in the greenery and launch a surprise attack on my upper neck. I am terrified of contracting dengue fever, yellow fever, or malaria.

The barman is convinced I neither speak nor understand a word of French, no matter how many times I talk in French to him. [...]