TOBI'S DESK

Photo: Lucas Marquardt.   Ada Limón’s poetry is like staring into a cloudy night sky and searching desperately for any signs of a star. Just when you’re about to give up, you find a single pinprick in the dark, enough light to remind you that something’s out there. With each poem in her new collection, The Carrying , Limón counterbalances her most paralyzing fears with her ability to find small twinges of hope. Much of Limón’s pain originates in her body: her twisted spine, her inability to conceive. “What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?” she despairs in “The Vulture and the Body.” But Limón’s pain supersedes the physical; through verse, her body becomes a simulacra of the political dread that has been sowed across the country. In the chilling lines of “A New National Anthem,” Limón wonders, “Perhaps / the truth is every song of this country/ has an unsung third stanza, something brutal / snaking underneath us … ” The only way Limón can fac...

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, I managed to vanish unnoticed from my day job in an office in midtown Manhattan and materialize in the lovely little ballpark on Staten Island, where a minor-league affiliate of the New York Yankees was taking on the Lowell Spinners, a Boston Red Sox farm team. Beyond the outfield wall, the Statue of Liberty rose green and glorious out of the harbor and, in the distance, the glass forest of downtown Manhattan shimmered in the afternoon sunshine. The outfield grass sparkled, the foul lines glowed. This was heaven—or at least a major upgrade from my 9-to-5. The crowd that afternoon was thin. It was, after all, a workday. The box score would claim the attendance was 1,664, which struck me as optimistic, and as I scanned my fellow diehards, I noticed something peculiar: Nearly every fan, myself included, was white. Among the wannabe Yankees and Red Sox down on the field, about half were white and half were Latino. There was only one black player on the fie...

Heinrich Harder, Pteranodon . Reconstructed by Hans Jochen Ihle, 1982. Most dinosaurs are dusted off as fragmentary skeletons. Paleontologists like Stephen Brusatte, author of the recent book, The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs , say they are “scrappy.” But those few bones can be enough to describe a new species, and on average, a new species is discovered every week. We are in the golden age of paleontology. “We’re up to around fifteen hundred,” Brusatte told me by phone in August. About a third were found in the last decade, with some, like Yi qi in 2015, “going viral and then vanishing from the news cycle.” Yi qi was pigeon-sized; a single specimen was located in northern China. It had feathers, like many dinosaurs, but also fleshy wings, like a bat. “Are you sure Yi qi’s not a Pokémon?” I asked. “It would make an adorable Pokémon,” he said. “Very licensable.” Unfortunately, the reference echoes an insult that Brusatte and his discipline cannot forget: in 1988, the Noble Prize–winnin...

It’s been 18 years since Alyson Hagy and I both won a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Nested within the list of grantees was a scattering of addresses. I wrote to Alyson. She answered. We’ve seen each other just twice in all these years. Our correspondence is legion. “I’m buried in a fat, loosely written Minette Walter crime novel just now,” she’ll write. “But Alice Munro and Madison Bell are next.” Or “I’m going to have to tweak the dramatic arc of the book in a significant way, but I think it’s the right way to go.” Or, “We have had a little cold rain here, and the skies have been huge and glowering—enough to tinge the aspens in town just a little.” Her notes are like miniature novellas. Her gifts—shells, cards, carved stones—populate my windowsills. Her emoji choices can be quite hysterical, and once the sound of her voice on the phone insta-cured a migraine. When an Alyson Hagy book makes its way into the world ( Ghosts of Wyoming ;  Snow, Ashes ; Keenelan...

There are many essays on the “five habits of successful writers,” or “how to get your writing done when everything else is crowding in on you.” This isn’t one of those pieces. It is, however, an essay about continuous identity in a world which constantly asks us to align the self with its occupation. I currently work as a college president. I also write poetry. If I had true courage, I used to tell myself, I would be “only a poet.” But I don’t say that anymore, since after much introspection I have accepted the fact that I love to build and make things, including institutions. Despite all of the criticisms (both deserved and undeserved) that have been leveled at liberal arts education these past few decades, it’s still one of the best gifts American culture has given to the world. I am daily inspired to lead a liberal arts college, with all the academic politics, long term resentments, and bureaucratic entanglements such work entails. I frequently hear the question, “How can you do b...

A French cult classic from 1972 is being published in English for the first time. Jean-Jacque Schuhl Jean-Jacques Schuhl answered the door in slippers, no socks. He offered me, in knowing jest, bio coffee , bio juice , or bio wine ( bio  is French shorthand for something close to organic ). I asked for the coffee. He shuffled out, came back with china in hand, and reported that it was still warm. I cleared a spot on the table between messy piles of paper. Schuhl’s first novel, the 1972 cult classic Rose poussiere , has recently been published in English for the first time by Semiotext(e) under the title Dusty Pink . It’s a slim little thing, a collage of mixed materials: assorted tear sheets, facsimiles, and news clippings like the ones across his table. Somehow, the net effect is as much a leering void as it is a mosaic of cultural scraps. The cumulative emptiness is as central to the work as the careful text. At seventy-six, Schuhl’s artistic output has...

What Her Daughter Sees , 2018 “There is no story that is not true,” says uncle Uchendu halfway through Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart . Storytelling is at the core of Brooklyn-based artist Toyin Ojih Odutola’s drawings, which center on the fictional narrative of TMH Jideofor Emeka, male heir of a long-standing noble clan, who marries Temitope Omodele, the son of a bourgeois family with recently-acquired wealth. The power couple are the cultural leaders of their community, and they exhibit their renowned art collection at notable art venues in the United States. Ojih Odutola deepens the fiction by presenting her own exhibitions as curated by the fictional couple, for whom she is the Deputy Private Secretary. The thirty-three-year-old artist left Nigeria with her family at early age, and spent her formative years in Huntsville, Alabama. Her new show, “When Legends Die,” at the   Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, dedicates two rooms to approximately thirty-five drawings. The...