Time shape-shifts. Our senses sharpen. Little things—the taste of sourdough; the sight of snap peas pushing through the dirt; the texture of a handwritten note—become large.

I was quite taken with the fact that her i remains uncapitalized, and her eye misses nothing.

How does she do it?

Summers are usually memorialized by their novelty, by the way they rupture ordinary routines—school years, breaks in the weather. Others are marked by convergences: of social and political movements, by terror or violence or economic precarity—sometimes all of them at once. The Summer of Love. The Freedom Summer. The Summer of Sam. Part of me wants to ask: How will the Summer of 2020 be remembered? But another part wonders: When will this summer ever actually begin?

What I wanted to do in telling Dwight’s story is capture the loony, obsessive passions—here, a love for astronomy—we’re capable of at Dwight’s age, passions that push us out to explore the big world. At the same time, I wanted to show the process by which we come to understand that the world is more complicated and troubled than we imagined.

The Sewanee Review stands in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and condemns the murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd. Our hearts break that such injustices continue to be perpetrated, but our hearts swell with hope and optimism at the most recent protests’ display of unity and their promise of systemic change. This is a time of extraordinary opportunity in our country—and here at the university—to make lasting changes for the better.

I told François that I was sitting in my car, parked in front of a Walmart, afraid to enter the store.

Aside from a mask, I have little protection to give them as they go. And I am left with the painful impression that a doctor with no answers is no doctor at all.

“How can a nation be great if its bread tastes like Kleenex?” Julia Child said, and my mother agreed. She bought frozen Pepperidge hard rolls and baked them in the oven, trying to duplicate the brittle crust, the taste of real bread. Now, I found myself thinking of her every time I weighed the risks of going into a store just for a fresh baguette.

I feel uneasy when any critic announces a poet’s themes and thesis because, at a certain point, poems aren’t interested in anything other than the voices and words they inhabit. If I were so moved, I’d argue that Hạo’s collection doesn’t have a subject; and that his poems resist paraphrase.