July 17, 2025 First Person The Same Damned Thing Over and Over By J. D. Daniels Photograph courtesy of J.D. Daniels. I knew a girl. Her hobbies included telling me I was wrong about my own life. More than once she said to me, “You say that you feel trapped in your past, and everything is repeating. I don’t understand that. Everything feels new to me, all the time,” and she struck a heroic pose, despite the fact that we had already had this argument forty times. Ladies and gentlemen, for your entertainment, we now present, snarling at each other, the world’s smartest ants. “Those who cannot remember the past,” wrote Santayana, “are condemned to repeat it.” Not as impressive as it seems, because those who can remember the past are also condemned to repeat it. It’s the only thing that ever happens: the past repeats itself. Everyone is condemned to repeat the past. The question is whether you are able to admit it or not. My mamaw used to say, “I thought life was just one damned thing after another until I realized it’s the same damned thing over and over.” Read More
July 15, 2025 Diaries Driving Academy Diary By Nicolaia Rips A dog who cannot drive. Photograph by Nicolaia Rips. August 19, 2024 My twenty-sixth birthday. A sad one. My godfather, Tom Crisp, is dying in a hospital in Morningside Heights. I want to focus on anything else, so I focus on this: I do not have my driver’s license. I promised myself at sixteen that before I turned twenty-six I would get my driver’s license, vowing that I wouldn’t end up one of those cautionary New York tales of gelded thirty-year-olds crammed into the bucket on a road trip. At the time, I felt a decade was more than generous. I was so optimistic at sixteen that I was the first of my friends to get my learner’s permit, which I then renewed beyond the point of propriety. A twenty-six-year-old is a foreign agent to a sixteen-year-old: someone who bears a vague resemblance to you. It is someone to punt your problems to—someone who passed their driving test. August 26 My godfather Tom passes away. September 1 I enroll myself in a driving academy and ride an electric Citi Bike over the Brooklyn Bridge to Hasidic Williamsburg. There, I am confronted by a store that advertises tax returns, copies, faxing, and legal services. There is no mention of driving. Not one to judge a business by its sign, I double-check the address. This cannot be the right place, but somehow it is. The class costs $400. It was the cheapest class I could find that wasn’t out of the back of a van. Included in the course: three driving lessons, access to the mandatory five-hour class, and, at the end of it all, you are ferried to your road test by one of the school’s instructors. My teacher, Fernando, guides me through the wide lanes of Williamsburg, sporadically directing me to pull over, turn left, turn right, parallel park, or make a three-point turn. I keep forgetting which pedal is gas and which is the brake, so I resolve to just go really slow. Fernando’s complete lack of anxiety is bone-chilling. Read More
July 11, 2025 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Eugene Ostashevsky on “Falling Sonnet XI” By Eugene Ostashevsky The second draft of “Falling Sonnet XI.” For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Eugene Ostashevsky’s “Falling Sonnet XI” appears in our new Summer issue, no. 252. How did you come up with the title for this poem? This is the eleventh poem in a series called Falling Sonnets. They are “sonnets” in the sense that each has fourteen lines with a Petrarchan logical structure, although without meter or rhyme. Right now, there are twelve, although I would prefer to have fourteen. The series reacts to one of the wars currently being fought. I’d prefer not to name which one—as soon as you do, the poem’s reception depends on how readers feel about the war rather than on anything having to do with the poem. Four other poems from the series have recently appeared in n+1. My most recent book is called The Feeling Sonnets, and sections in it are called “Fooling Sonnets,” “Feeding Sonnets,” and even “Leafing Sonnets.” When I finished, I wanted to stop writing these sonnets, which aren’t real sonnets, anyway. But I was too busy to lay aside enough time to develop a new form for a new book, so I kept writing them, much to my chagrin. This is why I call my new sonnet book “The Failing Sonnets,” and a part of it is a cycle called “The Falling Sonnets,” because it reacts to a war that feels as if it had my name on it and that destabilizes my sense of self in unpleasant ways. Read More
July 9, 2025 Document An Account of the Catastrophe at the Flower Show By Tom Crewe Seven or eight years ago, a friend showed me a tatty packet of odd papers he’d picked up for six pounds at a sale. It looked just like it does in this picture. Most of the papers are an English translation of a sixteenth-century letter written by a French Protestant. I still haven’t read it. What got my attention right away was the remarkably pristine purple invitation to a flower show taking place on July 27, 1891. Read More
July 7, 2025 On Nature The Language of Stones By André Breton “The Large Tortoiseshell and the Chieftan … discuss the mystery of beginnings and ends.” Photograph by D. Stanimirovitch. “Infinitely far from the world of flowers,” sighs Novalis. What about the world of stones! And where along the way do we pick up the idea that we know what we’re talking about? Of course, the question only makes sense to those who believe that nothing around them can be in vain, that everything must somehow concern them; that a perception recurring infinitely from the morning to the night of life, like that of the object generically called stone, could not be purely self-contained and remain a dead letter. The learned classifications of mineralogists leave them entirely unsatisfied. Indeed, these scientists are to them only a category of those “eloquent naturalists” who cling to the visible and tangible and of whom Claude de Saint-Martin could say that “they disappoint our expectation by not satisfying in us this ardent and pressing need, which drives us less toward what we see in sensible objects, than toward what we do not see in them.”1 Read More
July 3, 2025 First Person Monks in Jersey By Simon Wu We came in two cars. A white Honda Odyssey, the back row of seats kowtowed under great reams of toilet paper. Everything else—cartons of grapes, jugs of water, Tupperwares of cut fruit, all of our modern alms—in the trunk. The rest in a white Toyota Corolla. Two cars full of supplies and people for a weekend of living more with less. Not for camping, but for monkhood. “You all will need to unload the car when we get there,” my mom said, patting foundation over her face in the passenger seat mirror. “I can’t move very much in this dress.” She was wearing a high-neck gold dress covered with embroidered flowers and tiny tassels. It was one of three dresses that she had sewn with fabric ordered from Burma months ago. She wanted to have options, she’d said. Read More