Join Paul Franz live for a reading from his poetry collection in progress, followed by a brief Q&A on the craft of poetry and his process. Please enter the coupon code 34MAGcEW to waive the booking fee.

Here, where field drops to sea,

where big applause, beginningless,

of surf and gulls drowns the fledgling

speeches fluttered from the stage

our entrance made this gray-green into:

properties and features turn

to charges that our presence is

assertion, groundless, unconfirmed

by rocks and waves that turn aside

their gaze or merely

stand. A man might fall. A bird

falls a fall, grasping strands

of world we cannot, threading world

into world as loosened from one

place, anchored to prey, it

bends, taking itself under

what its seeming rupture takes

away: what sudden wave-trough surface

might have returned a face.

("Rathlin Island")

Paul Franz has published poems and stories in the New York Review of Books, Hobart, Berfrois, Prelude, and AGNI, among others. His essays and criticism appear in journals including The Atlantic, London Review of Books, TLS, The Nation, TANK, The Hedgehog Review, RealClearBooks, and on his Substack newsletter, which also features fiction and poems. He is the editor of the journal Literary Imagination, published by Johns Hopkins University Press, and, with Matthew Gasda, of Serpent Club: New Writing (new issue out April 16).

Find more of Paul's work at the following links:

Substack:

Ashes and Sparks (Substack)

Poems and Fiction:

"Rathlin Island" (New York Review of Books)

"Incarnadine" (Hobart)

"Anabasis" (Hobart)

"Breakwater" (Prelude)

"Etymon" (Berfrois)

"Tristan and Isolde" (Berfrois)

Essays and Criticism:

On John Cowper Powys (The Mars Review of Books)

On Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys, Doom Loops, and AI (TANK)

On John Banville and His Alter Ego (The Atlantic)

On Ange Mlinko (London Review of Books)

On Mourning and Apocalypticism (The Hedgehog Review)

On Rachel Cusk (RealClearBooks)

On James Salter (RealClearBooks)

On Stephen Crane (The Nation)

On Osamu Dazai (The Nation)

Scholarly Articles

"The Persistence of the Archaic: Rachel Cusk as a Reader of D. H. Lawrence," D. H. Lawrence Review

"The Always Inconvenient Dead: Lyric Theory and T. S. Eliot's Early Verse," Eliot Now

"D. H. Lawrence, Literary Impressionism, and the 'Scene of Writing," D. H. Lawrence Review