Departments

Dear Readers, This is the long-awaited “Fall 2024” issue arriving in January 2025. Here is part of the reason why—in addition to the arbitrariness of print publishing deadlines in the current era, the second half of 2024 contained more panic, rupture, and change than any previous year of my life: a sudden divorce, urgent move, dropping off son at college, overseeing son’s leaving said college, spending half the week as writer-in-residence at Smith and the

I love it when a poem teaches me something I didn’t know about the endless strangeness of our human past. I had never heard of chicken skin gloves before reading Evangeline Riddiford Graham’s wonderful poem about them. All the rage in Europe from the eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth, the gloves were intended to soften and whiten the hands of aristocratic ladies, and were made not out of actual chicken skin (phew—that does sound rather gross)

To the editor of LIBER, I knew I was gonna love Jessica Baumgardner’s piece about Catherine Newman’s novel Sandwich (“Flesh and Blood,” volume 3, issue 1), and then I loved it even way more than that. The writing about Jessica’s inner life and relationship to her family is so vivid—it all resonates and shows me things I might have missed otherwise. (Like, a 4:30 p.m. rage hour is a thing?!) I loved what she says

At around seven weeks of pregnancy, a mucus glob forms in the cervix and turns it from funnel into stopper. This blood-tinged plug keeps the baby in utero and anything lurking in your vagina out. When the evocatively named “bloody show” discharges, it’s time for the main event. I learned the term a few months before giving birth the first time, after which I shoved the gory mucus plug into the back of my consciousness-closet,

There’s something so American about Rae Armantrout’s poetry. It has the sudden breaks, the start-and-stop of Emily Dickinson; the direct colloquial speaking voice of William Carlos Williams; the abstract playfulness of John Ashbery. Her poems offer a constant sense of reinvention, and an invitation to the reader to make it all up along with the poet that I think of as America’s gift to poetry. This is a poet who puts her secrets on the

January 29, 2024 To the editor of LIBER, One trend I observed while researching my book The World According to Joan Didion was people’s tendency to project themselves onto Didion. The writer had a strong moral center but also an intellectual empathy that made her adaptable to different ways of thinking, and that led her to frequently question her own received values. When S.C. Cornell declares the writer a conservative in her disappointingly inaccurate—could she