You're The Muscle / I Cut From The Bone And Still The Bone / remembers, Still It Wants (so Much It

what are the best academic essays you’ve ever read?

audaces: a study in political phraseology

“domestici hostes”: the nausicaa in medea, the catiline in hannibal

catiline’s ravaged mind: “vastus animus”

the two voices of virgil’s aeneid 

in defence of catiline

antony, fulvia, and the ghost of clodius in 47 bc

the duplicate revelation of portia’s death

virgil’s carthage: a heterotopic space of empire

the taciturnity of aeneas

gender and the metaphorics of translation

the poets are only the interpreters of the gods by whom they are severally possessed.

Plato, Ion tr. Benjamin Jowett

Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or 'life,' we are making it out of ourselves

Barnett Newman, The Sublime is Now 

as if you could not enjoy love without pain.

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June

“There is only now; and no matter how this war came about, no matter how it is run, it belongs to us. ‘Because I am involved in mankind’. And one must remain involved in all mankind, even uselessly, and even if one is intellectually conditioned to doubt and despair. Otherwise one might as well be dead.”

— Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn

those eyes which looked as if they had been fished from the bottom of the sea

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

To make something beautiful should be enough. It isn't. It should be.

Richard Siken, Landscape with a Blur of Conquerors

“I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me. The world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign & re-create myself…” 

The true and serious beauty  of trees, how it seemed insane that they should offer this to us, how unworthy we were, bewildered how soon we were nearly weeping at their trunks as they tossed down petal after petal, and we tried to remember how it felt to receive and notice the receiving

Ada Limón, Hooky

she taught me the poems of these death-facing women and I understood them to be my mothers.

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book