Bright, Built World
April 9, 2026 at 08:15PMJoseph Osmundson, a molecular biologist, considers the recent work of Anne Carson and Richard Siken, two poets “writing from the inside of neurodegeneration . . . considering the brain as it loses itself.” (Carson has Parkinson’s disease, and Siken survived a stroke.) His essay—an entrancing mix of criticism, memoir, and craft talk—reveres the body and the act of writing, despite the threshold that waits to quiet us. “Language,” he writes, “is worth staying alive for.”
Words are the first metaphor, the word standing in for the object. If words lose their primary meaning, then metaphor has left the room. How to get into the room of metaphor again? We write. “A doorknob is a rock for the hand. It opens a hole in the wall,” Siken writes, and I can feel the rock in my hand. There is no metaphor here, only a search for the meaning that comes before metaphor.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/04/09/writing-stroke-parkinsons-siken-carson/
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