My body, in other words, physically rejects the idea that I write as anyone other than the man I am or that my experience as a man is therefore any less inclusive of everything you mean when you use the phrase “feminine soul.”

For her third question, the Iranian poet quoted something I wrote in our correspondence that was not part of my answer to either of her two pervious questions: What I’ve been thinking is that no one I know who is not an academic fully understands the degree to which grading essays is emotional labor. Even […]

Last month, in a post called The Source of War, I shared with you the second question asked by the Iranian poet who was interviewing me last year. This month, I want to share with you the first question she asked, which I will confess threw me for quite a loop when I read it: […]

From April through September of last year, I was corresponding with a poet from Iran who’d asked to interview me. Given the current situation and the fact that I know nothing about the poet’s situation, not even whether or not they are still alive, I am not going to name them here, but I’ve been […]

Not too long after I began hosting First Tuesdays, an open mic/featured reader literary series that had been running in my neighborhood since 2007, I attended Enough Is Enough, a meeting organized by a group of women poets who were “fed up with the reality of sexual violence, intimidation, and misogyny that continues to exist […]

In The Conference of the Birds, a Sufi allegory which I summarized briefly in Part One of this series, Farid al-Din Attar calls the penultimate stage of enlightenment, the final one the birds must pass through before reaching their goal, “The Valley of Bewilderment.” In this context, however, bewilderment does not signify mere confusion. Rather, it names a stage […]

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for youAs yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bendYour force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.I, like an usurp’d town to another due,Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;Reason, your viceroy in me, me should […]

The idea of love at first sight has always struck me as a scam. It’s possible, of course, for two people to feel an immediate and intense connection that can go well beyond the physical, but the happily-ever-after we’ve mythologized as the inevitable result of that connection sets up expectations that the often heart-breaking work […]

(Read Part 1 here.) When I was an undergraduate, a man I looked up to as a teacher and a mentor took me to his studio so I could see some of his recent paintings. There was one that I could not stop staring at: a naked man falling through a fractured landscape of colors, […]

That the mystical experience of transcendence exists outside of language is axiomatic to those who pursue it. It follows, then, that such experience also exists outside the network of power relations ineluctably embedded in language—outside, in other words, of politics, in the largest possible sense of that term. While part of me has always found […]