The Pulitzer Prize-winning author talks to Gulf Coast about trees, the transformative power of storytelling, and how writers might respond—and stay responsive to—the unique demands of this moment in both human- and tree-time.

Triple check the joist hooked / from your garage ceiling / is rated for at least 97 pounds.

It was night / Death slept naked / on God’s corpse

Pinball takes place in a more liminal environment: those may be your physical fingers hitting flipper buttons and your real voice cussing out Bride of Pin-Bot, but your vision, your concentration—everything about you that’s more consciousness than body—moves outside of yourself and behind a thin layer of glass.

Reading Tamas Dobozy recently has been like hearing the chime of an antique clock in a crowded internet cafe.

And then went down to the ship / Moisheh set amongst the godly reeds / Red mud and clay, green shoots lining / The river with the hard sun pressing...

It turns out some people will risk anything for a haircut. They will meet under a bridge, they will text unknown numbers, they will venture out into a pandemic. It turns out that I may have a strange relationship, obsession—whatever you want to call it—with hair, but so does almost everyone else.

The arcade I lived in was the cryptograph, more or less. / The dog named Mila demanded evidence of the crowd. / You rented a room in the hotel by the sea.

In their entry on love, Berlant writes that we tend to (mistakenly) use the objects our desire attaches to in order to assume an identity— “you know who…

For Berlant, part of the problem of politics is that marginalized people have to accommodate the feelings of their majority counterparts in order to successfully…