If I Had A Prayer, It Would Say, Let This Not Be A Mirror To The Past, Nor A Window To The Future. Let

thinking about Kait Rokowski writing, "nothing ever ends poetically, it ends and we turn it into poetry. all that blood was never once beautiful. it was just red." and losing it

The rain hovering over the city for days  finally fell. You were arriving after years...

Garous Abdolmalekian, Meeting tr. Ahmed Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey

Are there two ways of knowing the world? a submissive and a devouring way. They end up roughly the same place.

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

Much has been said and written about the ‘haiku moment’ - that it blurs the distinction between ‘subject’ and ‘object’, ‘self’ and ‘other’; that in it the perception of the essential and accidental, of the beautiful and the ugly, disappears; that it reflects things are they are in themselves.

- Yoel Hoffman, Japanese Death Poems

All the bells say: too late.

John Berryman, Dream Song 29

Remains of colour on temple columns.

The true and serious beauty  of trees, how it seemed insane that they should offer this to us, how unworthy we were, bewildered how soon we were nearly weeping at their trunks as they tossed down petal after petal, and we tried to remember how it felt to receive and notice the receiving

Ada Limón, Hooky

For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing,

Plato, Ion tr. Benjamin Jowett

FOR RENT: / an empty sky

- Agata Tuszyńska, Classified Ads tr. Regina Grol

what are the best academic essays you’ve ever read?

audaces: a study in political phraseology

“domestici hostes”: the nausicaa in medea, the catiline in hannibal

catiline’s ravaged mind: “vastus animus”

the two voices of virgil’s aeneid 

in defence of catiline

antony, fulvia, and the ghost of clodius in 47 bc

the duplicate revelation of portia’s death

virgil’s carthage: a heterotopic space of empire

the taciturnity of aeneas

gender and the metaphorics of translation