LESLEY WHEELER

Month: July 2013

  • Poetry as speculative fiction; or, being naive

    I don’t share in ritual contempt for literary criticism as an enterprise—how could I and still bear to live with myself?—but having spent too much of the summer engaged in a massive review of several critical fields, I feel annoyed about the whole endeavor. English Departments are full of brilliant, passionate people but most of […]

  • Reviews the length of an irritating splinter

    I’ve been having fun condensing reactions to books and movies into 140 characters—sort of a Twitter diary of reading and watching. I don’t include works I didn’t find interesting or the five million books of lit crit and theory I’ve been reading for a current writing project. As I get older and more impatient, I […]

  • Chimeras in the poetry zoo, or speculative verse novels

    Knock me over with a griffin feather: even though I published one, I did not understand that the contemporary speculative verse novel for adults was a thing. Much less a thing that gets published by Norton and Knopf.* So I’ve been roaming the field, discovering weird beasts lurking around the poetryscape. Preliminary conclusion: the stories […]