A Conversation with David Biespiel

David Biespiel is a poet, novelist, critic, memoirist, and painter. The author of over twelve books, he is a contributor to The New Yorker, The New Republic, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and e…

theadroitjournal.org

Notes on an Incident: Paintings for Trees

Future and past blurred; what he had already experienced and what he would eventually experience blended so that nothing remained but the moment. ―Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric …

theadroitjournal.org

A Review of Eva Figes’s Nelly’s Version

Circular logic, circular reasoning, and cast shadows people Eva Figes’s 1977 novel of an unreliably narrated account of a woman’s descent into dissociative forgetfulness. Told by a woman—presumab…

theadroitjournal.org

The Gecko Was Never Dead

Almost two decades ago, while backpacking alone in Costa Rica, I fell in love with a Jersey surfer named Tom. I had escaped to Costa to get away from an obsessive, stalking ex. Tom had come down th…

theadroitjournal.org

Issue Fifty-Eight

Visit the post for more.

theadroitjournal.org

A Conversation with Julie Buntin

Julie Buntin’s new novel, Famous Men, is recently out from Random House. She’s also the author of Marlena (Holt, 2017)—a finalist for the NBCC John Leonard Prize—and the co-editor of Notes to…

theadroitjournal.org

A Review of Lisa Russ Spaar’s SOUL CAKE

A soul cake, I did not know, was a small, spiced cake given to the poor or to children, who would in turn offer prayers for the deceased thought to be lingering between earth and heaven. One might …

theadroitjournal.org

​​A Review of Kelli Russell Agodon’s Accidental Devotions

Accidental Devotions, Kelli Russell Agodon’s fifth full-length collection published by Copper Canyon Press in May 2026, is an incandescent and tender exploration of what it means to be human in the…

theadroitjournal.org

The Canopy App

When I was a child in the backwoods of a provincial place there were so many forests trees bounding all around us you could climb carve sleep under boughs…

poetryfoundation.org

A Conversation with Ryan Teitman

Ryan Teitman is the author of the poetry collections Litany for the City (BOA Editions, 2012) and Paperweight (University of Akron Press, 2026), winner of the Akron Poetry Prize. His poems have app…

theadroitjournal.org

The Glory of Love

When I was a young man in high school, you believe it or not, I wanted to play football for the coach, begins the titular, closing track of Lou Reed’s sixth solo album, Coney Island Baby, released …

theadroitjournal.org

Poetics of Place #1: Pahrump, Nevada

I drive slowly on the shoulder of HWY 160, thirty miles west of Las Vegas, outside of Pahrump, Nevada, looking for the land which will become the western edge of the Rough Hat Solar project. I come…

theadroitjournal.org

A Review of Jake Rose’s JOAN

The winner of the 2026 Phoenix Emerging Poet Prize from The University of Chicago Press, Rose’s astounding debut volume of poetry rhapsodizes on a paradoxically controlled beat, inhabiting the ling…

theadroitjournal.org

A Third Commonness: Essays on Poetry, Poetics, and the Natural World

This is, by my count, my third gathering of essays and reviews. And I noticed that, inside the genre of the essay, it includes a number of introductions—an introduction to an anthology of the histo…

theadroitjournal.org

Issue Fifty-Seven

Visit the post for more.

theadroitjournal.org

A Conversation with Carl Phillips

In the Blood, Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Phillips’s debut collection, was rereleased last month, over three decades after its original publication. The book signaled the arrival of a singular, ne…

theadroitjournal.org

A Conversation between Genevieve DeGuzman and Kate Gaskin

To read Genevieve DeGuzman’s Karaoke at the End of the World (JackLeg Press, 2026) is to undergo a crash course in marvels. Woven through this debut collection are complex relational intricacies be…

theadroitjournal.org

nytimes.com

On Shame and Rejection

When Nate Marshall called to tell me I’d won the 2025 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, I lost it. Jumped for joy. Wept. Could not—in any way—keep it together. What I’d longed for, and worked towa…

theadroitjournal.org

A Conversation with Elisa Shua Dusapin

I have admired Elisa’s evocative prose and intimate stories ever since I discovered Winter in Sokcho in French at my hometown local bookstore while on vacation in France. Ten years later, it is a…

theadroitjournal.org

A Review of Will Brewer’s Nocturama

A nocturama is an architectural device: a controlled, low-light habitat in which nocturnal animals can be observed during manufactured daylight. Visitors enter a reversed world where creatures accu…

theadroitjournal.org

A Review of D.S. Waldman’s Atria

It feels appropriate that D.S. Waldman’s debut poetry collection, Atria, opens with the speaker looking at the work of the artist Alexander Calder. Calder’s mobiles and Waldman’s poetry could be di…

theadroitjournal.org

A Conversation with Richie Hofmann

Richie Hofmann is the recipient of a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2025 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His poetry appears in two previous collections, A Hundred …

theadroitjournal.org

Writing from Innocence: A Conversation with Evgeniya Dame

Evgeniya Dame’s “Mother, Tongue” follows two women navigating a teacher’s training college in Samara, Russia. Language sits at the forefront of the story, less a subject of study for its narrator t…

theadroitjournal.org

Issue Fifty-Six

Visit the post for more.

theadroitjournal.org

From Grant Faulkner and Gail Butensky’s something out there in the distance

“How do you describe a person?” How do you describe a person? Is it their smell, the rhythm of their breaths? The way they pinch their lips without even knowing it, the crimp of their brow? …

theadroitjournal.org

A Review of Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s The New Economy

Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s The New Economy, published by Copper Canyon Press in October 2025, is a portal of hauntings and extraordinary song, summoning readers to have courage amidst their own sorro…

theadroitjournal.org

A Review of Lana Lin’s The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam

My copy of Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas features two portraits on its cover. The first, depicting a sepia-toned Stein with her famous cropped haircut, takes up over half th…

theadroitjournal.org

A Review of Olga Ravn’s The Wax Child

Musk and petrichor waft from the pages of Olga Ravn’s third novel, The Wax Child. The novel details the tragedy of 17th-century Danish women condemned for witchcraft, as told in first-p…

theadroitjournal.org

A Conversation with Varun Ravindran

This interview took place in a courtyard outside of Varun’s Pittsburgh apartment on a summer evening in July. The sound of cicadas, crows, and blue jays called out during our conversation. Varun an…

theadroitjournal.org