Messina’s writing is bleak and tender and honest and is not trying to persuade me of anything, least of all that things will work out.

I love gossip in poems, and I love to see friendship performed in pieces of art, so I don’t know how to create things like that without those kinds of references.

Without awe, how can we dream up a different reality? Without wonder, the dark matter of possibility, how do we find the courage to zoom in on our unbearable humanity?

To ask whether the pornographic narrative style does anything (and to value it accordingly) is to buy into the promises of virtuous consumption. It is to believe that consuming a book somehow transforms aesthetic experience into social action.

Without awe, how can we dream up a different reality? Without wonder, the dark matter of possibility, how do we find the courage to zoom in on our unbearable humanity?

Many of the people we encounter in the pages of this book do not identify as smugglers but as workers of various kinds.

These poems leave us with a gentle litany of things left behind—things more suitable, perhaps, for the more subtle shades of grief.

[The novel’s] layering surpasses anything like theme or plot and suffuses into a kind of aesthetic ethos which justifies the old saying: The novelist picks up where the historian has to stop.

I love gossip in poems, and I love to see friendship performed in pieces of art, so I don’t know how to create things like that without those kinds of references.

With comics, for better or worse, you can’t really hide from who you are. You’re spending so much time working on these things that you can’t keep up a persona for that long.

Communing with the mineral/rock world is also another way for me to contemplate time, and to understand that the destructive/creative geologic processes are always underfoot.

The curse and hex lie alongside the charm and balm. Rhetoric has no team, rhetoric has no flag. 

Messina’s writing is bleak and tender and honest and is not trying to persuade me of anything, least of all that things will work out.

To ask whether the pornographic narrative style does anything (and to value it accordingly) is to buy into the promises of virtuous consumption. It is to believe that consuming a book somehow transforms aesthetic experience into social action.

Why is cynicism so seemingly tied to whiteness?

Perhaps there is a tablet, a Dylar that actually works, that would make me forget Baumbach’s movie as the Gladneys wanted to forget death.

We’re excited to announce the 2022 Full Stop Editorial Fellows: Ching-In Chen and Gillian Joseph!

The year’s best books, as selected by the editors of Full Stop.

This episode includes an interview with Keely Shinners, as well as a sound experiment between Ansgar Allen and Mike Carrao.

Any money you donate to Full Stop today will go twice as far toward ensuring the future of independent literary criticism. There has never been a better time to donate.