Posted on June 11, 2018
by Lesley Wheeler
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For the last week, I’ve lived in the land of the long blink. We arrived home eight days ago from the aforementioned intense trip to Europe, and I dutifully took sunlit walks to reset my body clock, swallowed melatonin at the appointed hours, and… Continue Reading “Hundred-year nap”
Posted on March 22, 2014
by Lesley Wheeler
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My speculative poetry students have been asking brilliant questions during the past two weeks: what’s Tracy K. Smith’s attitude towards a posthuman future in Life on Mars? How does assigning a higher priority to the natural world change Marvin Bell’s sense of what death… Continue Reading “Instructions for creating England”
Category: UncategorizedTags: Darling Hands Darling Tongue, Dolezel, fantasy, heterocosmica, James Merrill, Jeannine Hall Gailey, lyric poetry, Sally Rosen Kindred, speculative poetry, teaching, Todorov, Tracy K. Smith
Posted on February 19, 2014
by Lesley Wheeler
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On Valentine’s Day, I was asking my class about the psychedelic weirdness in Natalie Diaz’s poems about her brother’s meth addiction, when I suddenly realized I felt surreal myself: headache, vertigo, a conviction the last leftover scraps of bo ssam had not been such… Continue Reading “Valentine’s Day in the uncanny valley”
Category: UncategorizedTags: 2001 a Space Odyssey, akta manniskor, almost human, androids, AWP, Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comics, father, god, Life on Mars, modernism, Natalie Diaz, Sally Rosen Kindred, skepticism, speculative poetry, Tracy K. Smith, Valentines, When My Brother was an Aztec
Posted on November 24, 2013
by Lesley Wheeler
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High winds are plucking the last shriveled leaves off the branches while professional reading piles accumulate, isolating as snow-drifts: student papers, dossiers and writing samples from job applicants, scholarly mss I’ve promised to evaluate. At war with myself about whether I really need a… Continue Reading “What I really read, and why, and what it means (Splinter Reviews Part 2)”
Category: UncategorizedTags: Darling Hands Darling Tongue, Emily Croy Barker, Gravity, Jo Walton, Karen Joy Fowler, Nathalie Anderson, poetry, Quiver, reading, Sally Rosen Kindred, splinter reviews, Stephen King, watching
Posted on March 14, 2013
by Lesley Wheeler
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I’m risk-averse, at least financially. My mother felt trapped in a bad marriage by her lack of education and her sense that she couldn’t earn a decent living. I remember thinking as a child: come hell or high water, I WILL have my own… Continue Reading “Career Suicide”
Category: UncategorizedTags: Ann Fisher-Wirth, AWP, career, Iris Jamahl Dunkle, Lawrence Schimel, Luisa Igloria, poetry, Rafael Campo, risk, Sally Rosen Kindred, Strange Horizons, The Receptionist and Other Tales
