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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

Kamala is not an item on a menu, where you get to say hold the fries and I’ll have the salad instead. Do you know how many times people have written on my posts,  I like your writing but I don’t always agree with you. Like I need to know this. I don’t need to know this. You only say this kind of thing to women so they will understand they are being chopped into

The Calm About a blanket being held openA hand on the hemstitch of that flapAbout this feeling I will never feel againAbout this feeling you never felt sinceYou held the blanket, your arm, the whiffOf your armpit, the flesh of you whoNever wore clothes in bed, your nakednessFelt all the way through my travel clothesMy purse and my suitcase dropped in the hallAnd all the rushing, checkpoints, and rainFlying into the night like pinpoint lightsBlinking