Imagine standing under the night sky on the side of a mountain, surrounded by a thousand Ku Klux Klan members, all wearing their ghastly hoods and sheets. A huge burning cross casting monstrous shadows over the proceedings. You are also wearing a Klan sheet, but you are not one of them. You are there as a spy, to report their illegal activities to the police and expose their tactics of hate and intimidation. They have made it clear that they will kill anyone who betrays …

Eileen Myles is a feminist, beat, punk poet and it is no surprise that she was befriended by Allen Ginsberg upon her arrival in New York City in the mid-seventies, giving her first reading at CBGB’s in 1974. Her first book of poetry, The Irony of the Leash was published in 1978. Like Michelle Tea, Myles grew up working-class, lesbian, and well-read in Massachusetts. Somewhere along the way, she fell under the mentorship of poets like Robert Creeley and James Schuyler. …

We live in a Gogol world. He may have died 150 years ago but his world is our world, a world of absurdities haunted by ghosts and government clerks, where people are victimized by committees and asylums, where rational insanities and irrational truths determine the course of lives. His writing remains modern not only because he avoids the archaic language that makes other writing of the era virtually unreadable, but because he deals in universal truths. Reading Gogol, we recognize characters, places and situations to …