What would Walt Whitman do?

“[Walt] Whitman would never get in the way of a boy trying to get off with another boy. Bros before prose.”

— Lisa Henry

“But something special happened to American poetry in the 19th century when Walt Whitman broke with more traditional English poetics and fashioned an American…

— Anonymous

“For a moment, he thought he sensed, beneath the visible world, some blind infrastructure connecting the two of them, or the three of them,…

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“Daddy just repeated the word, internship . As an alibi, it was a thing of beauty: its overtones of responsibility, of upward aspiration, were…

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“Darkness just loosens the mask. Sharpens the mind's eye. Makes the color of a remembered pencil, or a tick of waxy red on a…

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“Now, though, there was a second part, an artifact of his recent illness, as if his melancholy had, in a universe adjacent to this…

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“And so she remained, like everything that mattered to me then, secret—to be pursued in the woods by moonlight, when I was supposed to…

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“Truly unconditional love was suffocating, in that it took so little notice of who you actually were.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“He lights a cigarette off a candle. These death-tubes, these little crutches or fuses: useful for getting through all sorts of things you don't…

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“But no, what interested him, psychologically speaking, was the sense of continuity itself, the mind's insistence that this was the same Regan he'd known…

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“Between the whiskers scraggling down his neck and the now-crooked glasses, he could have been the Black Allen Ginsberg.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“Because if every moment of a life is present in every other, so is every old self you've ever tried to outrun. And then…

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“Detonations crash in from nearby like walls she's a void at the center of.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“Though what could anyone really say these days with one hundred percent certainty?”

— Garth Risk Hallberg

“Despite which, Charlie seems doomed to stumble around in the dark, clutching pieces of a puzzle he still can't see.”

— Garth Risk Hallberg