"My favorite book of poetry. Hodgen makes the ordinary and the plain profound again and again. We all struggle to come up with the words to attach to our grief, our confusion, our losses. Hodgen is not immune to the plight. You can feel and appreciate the effort. He wrestles each of the ingenious little masterpieces from the struggle and the search."

"I love sonnets, with their iambic pentameter. This collection has most of her best-known works, but my favorite “I Shall Go Back Again to the Bleak Shore,” is in her Selected Poems edition. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923, only the third woman to do so. All her life she was an activist for women’s rights."

"My favorite Cassavetes film, Husbands, is not in this set . . . but nonetheless, his films mean everything to me. And I find his way of making films just as fascinating and inspirational as the films themselves. So that is why I adore A Constant Forge. Out of all the films in this collection, Charles Kiselyak’s documentary is the film I revisit the most."

"My favorite Cassavetes film, Husbands, is not in this set . . . but nonetheless, his films mean everything to me. And I find his way of making films just as fascinating and inspirational as the films themselves. So that is why I adore A Constant Forge. Out of all the films in this collection, Charles Kiselyak’s documentary is the film I revisit the most."

"My favorite Cassavetes film, Husbands, is not in this set . . . but nonetheless, his films mean everything to me. And I find his way of making films just as fascinating and inspirational as the films themselves. So that is why I adore A Constant Forge. Out of all the films in this collection, Charles Kiselyak’s documentary is the film I revisit the most."

"My favorite Cassavetes film, Husbands, is not in this set . . . but nonetheless, his films mean everything to me. And I find his way of making films just as fascinating and inspirational as the films themselves. So that is why I adore A Constant Forge. Out of all the films in this collection, Charles Kiselyak’s documentary is the film I revisit the most."

"My favorite Cassavetes film, Husbands, is not in this set . . . but nonetheless, his films mean everything to me. And I find his way of making films just as fascinating and inspirational as the films themselves. So that is why I adore A Constant Forge. Out of all the films in this collection, Charles Kiselyak’s documentary is the film I revisit the most."

"‘Consorting with Angels’ is one of my favorite Sexton poems, but with so much raw power it is hard to choose. ‘I was tired of being a woman, tired of the spoons and the post, tired of my mouth and my breasts, tired of the cosmetics and the silks.’ Sexton was and is so vital and so brazen. Mad respect."

"Like lots of people, I really love Roxane Gay. This is one of my favorite essay collections I’ve read in the past five to ten years. She’s really good at conversational writing that’s also academic and intelligent and funny. After #MeToo there’s a lot of introspection, and people need to analyze themselves and see what feminist they’ll be. There’s no perfect feminist."

"One of my favorite love stories. A deaf-and-dumb garbage man/surfer and his deaf girlfriend who is in complete admiration of him. I remember thinking of them when I saw a group of surfers on a beach at 5 a.m. in Japan. They were waiting for waves that never came... This is the moment I fell in love with Japan."