Alright folks I’ve been invited to give a lecture on ANY TOPIC of my choice—poetry, religion, history…. Need you to guide me! What do ya want me to hold forth about I’ll read every reply you’re kind enough to leave, feel free to suggest more than one topic…. 🙏🏽

Now that dead cats are in the news, consider this Life of Johnson anecdote that Nabokov selected as Pale Fire’s epigraph

Read our latest issue and celebrate our Contributing Editor, Amit Majmudar whose forthcoming book, Three Metamorphoses Orison Books is praised by Yale University Clement-Muehl Professor of Communication Arts, Christian Wiman! 🎉 marginaliareviewofbooks.com/so/2eP7db-Yu?l…

One of four new poems in the second issue of the beautifully produced new magazine, REVEL from Unbound Edition Press . Powerful lineup, a major new American magazine

Edmund Burke was a sworn enemy of the East India Company and colonialism…after he lost money on the EIC stock he bought with inside information while a member of Parliament

A poem for all the translators out there, such as Boris Dralyuk A.M. Juster (#Petrarch @wwnorton fall 2025) Alicia E. Stallings and many others: quadrant.org.au/magazine/uncat…

“this knock-off aqueduct that carries not the water but the thirst” !!

New poem about varieties of Murano glass, in the latest issue of REVEL —

“The god of the sky was never male.” New poem in REVEL - one of the poems that will feature in my forthcoming collection in 2026 from Alfred A. Knopf

of my sonnet writing burst, the first sonnet has been accepted--an auspicious beginning! though ofc there were more than one in the submission, so this also means these new sonnets have received their first rejections too...an inauspicious beginning! crossing omens

this is good advice....BUT: realize the Dickinson-Melville example everyone fixates on are EXCEPTIONS eg if French existentialists hadn't made some phone calls to the Nobel judges, we today wouldn't know who Faulkner was most permanent writers were famous in their own day

A new poem about an aging mother, in tercets that interweave to mimic a braid, out in REVEL … comes from the same imaginative place as my 2013 novel, The Abundance. This one is also slated to appear in the forthcoming Alfred A. Knopf collection in 2026

When the USA was about ten years older as a republic as India is right now, it launched into a full blown civil war. its secessionists lost In 1947, India was born through a civil war--Partition. its secessionists won a partial victory and then went into a civil war of their own

The Indians have been the world's conscience regarding animals for millennia this was common knowledge in antiquity here's Apollonius of Tyana (1st cent AD) talking about the ultimately Indian source of the wisdom and creaturely compassion of Pythagoras (c. 570 BC)

Much is made of Julian's apostasy but it's important to remember that he undertook all that religious upheaval while fighting Rome's equivalent of forever wars, on the front lines, taking fire. unprecedented levels of energy and initiative. napoleonic restlessness