This is ancestral water. My first time touching the Atlantic from the coast of West Africa. I walk calmly in, jeans and all, until the water is up to my waist.

This year’s Booker judges deserve kudos for a shortlist that rejects tribalism and troubles accepted ideas of home and homeland. These six novels pop the bubble of collective nostalgia in the service of new accords.

For me the poem’s manner of proceeding, contraption-wise, parts-wise, is an enactment of sensibility; sensibility, then, isn’t a separate thing that inhabits the poem.

It’s not an affliction, loneliness. It’s a trait; wicked, intelligent, curious, lonely. Like all distinguishing characteristics, it’s what you do with the loneliness that matters.

Here is what I want to do in this essay in the plainest possible terms: I want to help you attune yourself to the music of language.

She watched me open a drawer and stare down at a pile of sandwich crusts. Just the corners, Tetris-stacked in neat geometric designs, some with dried turkey still peeling out at the bite marks. I closed the drawer.

finding in the other

an animal
neither could hold.

Driving between cities you pass farms
and decreasingly know
what is growing there in rows.

When he came to, he was gazing into the blur of a woman’s face, freckles morphing and swimming like amoebas, until they resolved into the brow, the jaw, the nose of someone he’d seen before.