Author Archives: jolanta

“That’s great!” she said. “What’s a chapbook?” This reaction did not surprise me. Although they’ve been around in various forms since the 16thcentury, chapbooks have always been slightly removed from mainstream literary culture. Originally referring to any small booklet— from political pamphlets to collections of song lyrics— chapbooks were tremendously popular, especially in England, until […]

I don’t accept The Muse, regardless of how hard she tries to convince me of her existence. And I can tell you it ain’t Perseus that dispatches so swiftly of Medusa, as the Greeks would have you believe. It is me, on a midnight weekday usually, not long before the end of the year, when […]

I’m writing this a week after Todd Akin claimed that pregnancy in the case of rape was rare because “if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” I’m writing days after Arizona wrote into a law that pregnancy begins two weeks before conception in an […]