The relationships Shipstead forges for her characters are always tangled; in each, she notes the gravitational pull two people can have for each other as well as every other force—secrecy, trauma, guilt—that complicates it.

For the Binewskis, freakishness is valued above all else. The children are ranked, blatantly, by their oddities—the more repugnant they are to larger society, the better.

As we navigate this season of change, here are three books that have made our springtime a little greener.

And after the protest, back at home, my daughter play-acts a political rally wherein she begins her rally with a poem and ends it with a speech. My daughter is contending with all of these tensions and playing all through it. I take my lessons from her.

The Sewanee Review is pleased to announce that Garrett Hongo is the recipient of the 2022 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry.

Among all of spring’s emergent beauty here in Sewanee, I cannot give myself over completely to the sight of the larkspur’s purple flowers without associating it with bruises.

Of course it’s the ankle of the horse that’s holy. What bends and bears weight. What’s tough, but vulnerable. And, of course, the horse’s fate matters more than the jockey’s, the latter’s pain merely a cause in a string of conditionals, sufficient if not necessary, for it’s the horse and only the horse who must pursue this brief and endless beauty, who must break with it.

What a terrible predicament: to not know if love is conditional and yet to understand that the only way to find out is to risk losing it. I don’t know where everyone who takes that risk finds their faith, but I know where I have found it: first on the page, where I test those early words, groping for a way to say what I have tried to hide and hide from.

Clarissa Dalloway is privileged and bourgeois and her hunt for flowers is an arguably frivolous quest. And yet, because we understand Clarissa, we appreciate the importance of the dinner party. A bouquet of flowers becomes noble as a grail.