March 23, 2026 Triptych The One Thousand Blobcows Born Each Year By Morgan Day Photograph by Hans5400, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. A spotted creature is rolled across gravel. Another is placed on a dinner plate, then cradled in two palms. These were meant to be cows but emerged instead as balls of tissue and organs enclosed in hair coats. Their name, amorphous globosus, derives from the Greek and Latin for “formless sphere.” I watch videos of formless spheres for the same reason that I watch videos of miniature horses: I am in search of purity. Amorphous globosus is a nonviable creature, incapable of development or growth. It’s more easily understood by its missing parts: a head and limbs, a mouth and genitals. Occasionally, it’s given a useless heart. It’s continuous; a sphere at infinity with the weight of a water bottle. Within it are more ineffectual formless spheres, fluid-filled cysts in lieu of functioning organs. At a threshold of never having lived yet never having not, amorphous globosus is hard to categorize. Neither a tumor nor fetus, it’s relegated to an anomaly: a fetal monster. Amorphous globosus is often buried in the dirt like a dead animal. Read More
March 20, 2026 On Psychoanalysis Kafka’s Misdiagnosis By Aaron Schuster Drawings by Franz Kafka. Courtesy of the Literary Estate of Max Brod, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. Public domain. In a diary entry from February 1922, Franz Kafka writes of a deal he made with madness: There is a certain failing, a lack in me, that is clear and distinct enough but difficult to describe: it is a compound of timidity, reserve, talkativeness, and half-heartedness; by this I intend to characterize something specific, a group of failings that under a certain aspect constitute one single clearly defined failing (which has nothing to do with such grave vices as mendacity, vanity, etc.). This failing keeps me from going mad, but also from making any headway. Because it keeps me from going mad, I cultivate it; out of fear of madness I sacrifice whatever headway I might make and shall certainly be the loser in the bargain, for no bargains are possible at this level. The Kafkian protagonist (including the “I” of Kafka’s letters and diaries) is a loser who cannot make “any headway,” a schlemiel who secretly cultivates failure as the means of his persistence. The subject must lose, must fail; that’s the deal made with madness. Conversely, does this not imply that a successful Kafka would be not a socially well-adjusted, non-neurotic, even happily married Kafka, but rather a mad Kafka, one forced to pay a high price for not sacrificing headway in his pursuit, for going all the way to the end of his investigations? In “Investigations of a Dog,” the philosopher dog speaks of wanting to feed on the bone marrow of all the dogs, the marrow of truth—but then turns around and avows that this marrow is “no food; on the contrary, it is a poison.” Similarly, what if Kafka nourished himself on failure to avoid being poisoned by the truth he was seeking? Read More
March 18, 2026 Making of a Poem Making of a Poem: Joyelle McSweeney on “My Fortune” By Joyelle McSweeney Fritz Geller-Grimm, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Joyelle McSweeney’s “My Fortune” appears in our new Spring issue, no. 255. How did this poem start for you? For about a year I found the news so bleak that I turned away from the present tense and made myself a connoisseur of Fortune—the grave goods packed into the Pharaoh’s tomb—his mask, his cats, his casket. From the window of my phone, from the cold black cell of my wakefulness, I would watch rival Egyptologists make competing cases, revolving algorithmically, in and out of view. I watched Cocktails with a Curator, a series of hypererudite videos recorded by Frick Gallery staff from their apartments in New York at the height of lockdown, replayed now in sequence like a journal of the plague year—this swain, his lover, this horse, his Polish rider, this hat, this collar, this pearl. This vial. This tipsy lethal cup. One night, prowling among my treasures in the dark like a crone-ghost or crow, I saw a glittering promotion for some past Sotheby’s or Christie’s auction of a priceless silver service from the eighteenth century. It was laid out on a dark dining table, where you would expect to see such things in use, yet the pieces were crammed on all together, at once, as you never would expect to see them—all the tureens, all the platters, all the chargers, all the salts. And they were thickly lit, from every angle, as you would also never see in life. The light rinding the silver was unnatural, strange, dead. Some lord had lost his fortune. Read More
March 16, 2026 First Person The World Is an Easier Place Without You In It By Karen Shepard All photographs courtesy of Karen Shepard. September 17, 2023, 11:22 P.M. From: Ymei Subject: ….swiss self-end-of-life… To: Karen Shepard how much advance notice does one need for a date.. ? are there any particular requirements….? what is the cost….? can you find out…? * Read More
March 13, 2026 First Person Sagrado Corazón By Lina Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas Iglesia del Sagrado Corazón, Bilbao. Photograph by Zarateman, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. I was fifteen in the year 2000. Turn of the millennium, turn of tables and tides. Every morning there were reports on the radio, and every night the news showed footage of the peace talks between the Colombian government and the FARC forces. Folding tables and plastic chairs in a room with no walls, and I don’t think anyone really thought anything would come of it. Still, we watched. The future of our country on the screen and on a precipice. History about to reassert itself or buckle under the demands of men in linen shirts and bootlegged fatigues. At 9 P.M. every night between 1999 and 2002, the cameras settled on sweat-stained shirts and stern faces to capture the exact moment when we would all be remade with the stroke of a pen and a handshake like fishermen in a Bible verse. Microphones, dress shoes, and rifles. What’ll happen next? we asked. Stay tuned, they said. On Sunday night, May 14, it was the same. What will happen next? We’ll have to see. I washed my shoelaces in the bathroom sink for Monday school-uniform inspection before morning Mass, while three hours north of Bogotá, a man carefully packed explosives into a PVC pipe frame, like a hermit crab slides a soft body into a borrowed shell. Read More
March 11, 2026 On Books Bolaño’s Heresy: On Distant Star By Ben Lerner Photograph by Kgbo, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Are there any actual poems in Distant Star? “The three poems were short; all less than ten lines,” Arturo B., our poet-narrator, says of the early verse of Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, the mysterious autodidact who one day appears, as if from nowhere, in the poetry workshop Arturo attends. “One described a landscape: trees, a dirt road, a house in the distance, wooden fences, hills, clouds.” No part of the poem is quoted; we’re given none of the text or texture. According to Marta, another young poet in their orbit, these weren’t Ruiz-Tagle’s “real poems” anyway; even the poems withheld from us are only stand-ins. Where, then, in Distant Star, are the “real poems”? One fateful night soon after Pinochet seizes power, the Garmendia sisters—“identical twins and the undisputed stars of the poetry workshop”—read their poems to Ruiz-Tagle (right before he’s revealed to be the murderous aviator Carlos Wieder), but they don’t read them to us; we’re just told their poems are “wonderful.” They “often described painters lost in the wilds of southern Chile, embarking on hopelessly ambitious works and hopelessly in love.” (The poems we don’t see are about impossible works of art.) Again and again, poems are characterized in a way that only makes them more opaque: “the opening lines were worthy of Isidore Isou, while the unexpected ending would not have been out of place in a Chilean folk song,” or “a narrative poem, which … reminded me of John Cage’s poetic diary spliced with lines that sounded like Julián del Casal or Magallanes Moure translated into French by a Japanese psychotic,” and so on. Read More