The Post in the Machine: on Poetry and Il Postino

July 15, 2026.Reading time 22 minutes.

By Rowland Bagnall

Il Postino (1994) tells the story of Pablo Neruda’s brief exile in Italy. The film is adapted from the novel Burning Patience (1985) by Antonio Skármeta, which fictionalizes Neruda’s 1952 stint on Capri, during which he occupied a villa owned by the Italian historian Edwin Cerio. Skármeta’s novel relocates the episode to Isla Negra, a village on the coast of Chile, fast-forwarding events to 1969 in order to encompass both the poet’s Nobel Prize (awarded in 1971) and death in 1973. The novel unfolds against a backdrop of political unrest; Neruda died just days after the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s socialist government, a successful coup d’état led by General Pinochet. Il Postino, co-written by director Michael Radford and the film’s star, Massimo Troisi, restores the events of the story to Italy, exiling Neruda to another island in the Gulf of Naples. While the location isn’t specified, much of the film takes place on Procida, where Mario (Troisi), a simple, gentle man with a desire to outgrow his surroundings, lives with his aging father in a small fishing community.

The set-up of the film is straightforward enough. One night at the cinema, Mario sees a black-and-white newsreel of Neruda’s arrival in Rome, the voiceover explaining that the famous communist love poet has been unable to return to Chile on account of his political views. The footage soon turns to the island that Neruda is to stay on, at which point the audience bursts into applause, one man leaping to his feet when he sees himself up on the screen: “That’s me!” On his way home, Mario spots an advertisement for a job at the post office that requires a bicycle. Uninspired by his life as a fisherman, he bikes to an interview with the local postmaster-cum-telegrapher (Renato Scarpa) who promptly offers him the gig. Mario’s task will be to deliver mail to a single addressee, the celebrated poet, Pablo Neruda.

Gertrude Stein: The Matriarch of the Paris Salon

July 14, 2026.Reading time 12 minutes.

By Sunni Brown Wilkinson

The artist’s job is not to succumb to despair but to find
an antidote for the emptiness of existence.
–Gertrude Stein in Midnight in Paris.

I’ll admit something: all through graduate school I kept this to myself, but . . . I never liked Gertrude Stein. I remember a woman in my cohort swooning over Tender Buttons, but every time I read a Stein poem, I was just confused. What was she trying to accomplish? I didn’t get it. It felt too erudite, too experimental for me. Also a Stein fan, a professor at a nearby college told me she wanted to teach scansion to her Intro to Poetry students using Stein’s poems, and I couldn’t think of a better way to turn undergrads off poetry. Or Stein.

The photos didn’t do Stein any favors either. She looked severe with her short haircut and the perennial scowl she turned to the camera. She seemed terrifying. Someone more likely to be your friend’s ancient great aunt who only spoke to her dogs than a world-travelling, ground-breaking poet. Enter Kathy Bates in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.

Online Exclusive: Poetry in The English Patient

July 13, 2026.Reading time 18 minutes.

By John Hodgen
Art by Sage Kerrigan-Christ

There is no poet in The English Patient. Not a single one. And the patient isn’t English. And there is only one bodice ripped, though it is readily repaired by the penitent ripper. There’s a Canadian nurse who believes with good reason that everyone she ever loves is doomed to die. There’s a sapper from a bomb disposal squad who blows up and one who doesn’t. There’s a thief and morphine-addicted spy everyone calls Caravaggio whose thumbs are cut off and who blames a Hungarian count. And there is an English pilot’s wife who engages in a torrid and doomed affair with the Hungarian count who ultimately becomes the titular English patient. And still, there is no poet. Not one.

And yet there is, and her name is Katharine Clifton, and she has no idea she’s a poet, but she embodies one and may be the best representation of a poet to appear in a major motion picture that somehow thinks it’s a poem as well. Katharine is a change agent, a newly and already badly married woman dropped in out of the pre-war skies over Cairo to move within a group of men who represent the British Royal Geographic Society but call themselves, somewhat poetically, the International Sand Club. She seems as out of place as a poet among mapmakers, but she’ll transform them all. Nothing is ever quite what it seems in this film. Transference is all. A great war is coming peopled by lovers and traitors and fools. And Katharine is Circe but a Circe of true love whose childhood best friend has become her husband who now calls her “Sausage” and defends the word “uxoriousness,” to explain over-worshipping a wife. Then she engages with Count Lazlo Almasy, who worships his aloneness and history, especially that of his beloved Herodotus in his battered leather-bound book, and who does not worship wives until he meets her. That transference of allegiances, that dramatic awakening is what poems often aim for and what movies that want to be poems aim for as well. It works best if the author of The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje, is more often a poet than a novelist. Anthony Minghella, the screenwriter and director, is also a poet, a visual one, line after line of the film filled with imagistic figures of speech, charged and charred language, parallel characters, interwoven stories and countries, and even the Arabic names for the winds of Egypt and the parts of the body for which there can never be enough names.

The Dazed Poetics of Richard Linklater’s Waking Life

July 12, 2026.Reading time 12 minutes.

By Lilia Santeramo

If Richard Linklater loves one thing, it’s good talk. There are few directors, save for the ones we suspect inspired him, whose films rival Linklater’s in sheer chattiness. In a Linklater film, the plot and action happen primarily within and around unending speech. Waking Life, Linklater’s 2001 foray into animated film, is no different.

The film follows a nameless, desultory young man played by Wiley Wiggins as he navigates a bizarre, existentially fraught dream in which he also happens to be trapped. In the dream, Wiggins encounters a large cast of characters who explain their worldviews, which are often influenced by briefly referenced artists, thinkers, and poets. As the film progresses, it repeatedly uses talk of art as an avenue to reach understanding and awareness.

For Wiggins, it becomes apparent that reaching awareness—of his own dream state, of art itself—is the key to freedom from his seemingly endless, inescapable reverie. Though only a few poets are mentioned in the film, each time they are Wiggins reaches a pivotal moment in his journey out of the dream. Once, as he becomes lucid; and then again, right before he wakes up at the urging of a character who resembles Linklater himself, after that character rants about Yeats’ lover.

Yes, at its worst, Waking Life is name-droppy and unconvincingly “deep.” The film is often indulgent of the musings of stoned teenagers, made more palatable because instead of kids, a contemplative French woman and her lover (Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke as Before Sunrise’s Céline and Jesse) vocalize these ideas as they sit in bed, so it’s, you know, sophisticated. This is the kind of movie Woody Allen might have made if he was a slacker. But Waking Life isn’t just for Dorito-fingered, channel-surfing philosophers who reference artists and intellectuals without bothering to examine their ideas.

Mask 13

November 9, 2025.Reading time 45 minutes.

By Annemarie Neary
Featured Art by Rachel Hall

They had barely finished the introductions when he asked about the war. The endgame, the likely victor, things no Ukrainian cared to discuss with strangers.

‘I wish I knew,’ she said. Usually that was enough.

‘But what do you think?’

She managed to keep her tone level. ‘I try not to think. But I’ll do a good job here regardless.’

She didn’t like his smile any more than she liked his question. But she did want the job. A friend who was still in Kyiv had spotted the ad online. These things are almost never advertised, so Olena emailed right away with her CV.

Lore

March 16, 2024.Reading time 39 minutes.

By S Graham

Featured Art by Beth Klaus

Every night I tag a surface with the word LORE.

Last night: the wall of a mansion abandoned mid-construction.

The night before: the back garage of a boarded-up health spa.

Tonight: a section of the fence that marks the end of our skinny seaside town.

No one really comes down to this fence, no one except for surfers on their way to the beach and cyclists heading south. Beyond the fence are kilometers of forest before the next town. In front of it is where Lauren’s body washed up on the sand.

The fence was her training ground. Her minimalist tags run along it, as well as our father’s nickname for her in other styles: bubble throw ups, pichação pieces, the occasional wildstyle.

After adding my mimicry to the painted patchwork, I look at the precision of her lines and the sloppiness of mine. The contrast makes me petulant in the way I often was when we were kids and she was better at something, better at everything. But then my heart swells with pride and I have to get away from her symbols and signs.

I Am No Beekeeper

September 15, 2023.Reading time 32 minutes.

By Arya Samuelson

Selected as winner of the 2023 New Ohio Review Nonfiction Contest by Barrie Jean Borich

My housemate sleeps all day, makes art all night, and paints giant bees. “I want people to feel my paintings,” she says, stroking the palm of her hand against a still dripping head-to-toe canvas.

I keep my hands in pockets. We’ve only been at the art residency for a week, and she has already transformed her garage studio into a whimsical world of texture and wonder and touch. My art is trapped inside me. Weighs down my womb with rocks.

Speak Up

November 28, 2022.Reading time 19 minutes.

By Jesse Lee Kercheval

Selected as winner of the 2022 Nonfiction Contest by Melissa Febos

1.

I dream I am teaching and it is not going well. I still have these dreams though I retired a year ago. Counting grad school, I taught 38 years so this particular nightmare is hardwired into my nervous system. In my usual dream, I am talking, then shouting, at students who are talking to each other and not paying any attention at all—something that never happened in real life, unless a dream counts as life. In this dream, though, it is the students who are yelling at me. I can see their mouths open, their tongues wagging, every one of their white teeth, remarkably straight after years of expensive orthodontia—but it is a silent movie. I touch my ears, a reflexive movement to check if my hearing aids are there. Yes, but somehow they seem to have swollen, tripled in size, and to be plugging my ears like fat kids’ fingers, making sure all I hear is the sounds of my body, heart, lungs, that we hear without using our ears at all.

Take Your Trash and Make it Fly

June 12, 2012.Reading time 36 minutes.

By Devin Murphy

Featured Image: “Shoes” by Vincent Van Gogh

One night a month, people in my hometown outside of Buffalo, New York, put their large trash items on the curb for the sanitation department to pick up the next morning. Our neighbors would drag out old Whirlpool appliances, ironing boards, and whatever else the weekly garbage route couldn’t take. On those evenings, my Dutch immigrant mother loaded me into her rusted-over white 1970 Chevy Caprice station wagon with its vinyl side panel, and we’d slowly cruise the streets picking through the refuse.

From where I was slouching low in the passenger’s seat I’d get this fishbowl feeling as she slowed down and parked in front of those houses. Each home gave off a sense of neatness and order that seeped into their lawns. It always made me feel as if strangers were looking out their windows at us—or worse, people we knew. The idea of being watched made me want to pull my lower lip over my head and swallow myself whole. But my mother was unfazed as she picked discarded rabbit-ear antennas, steel rods, sheet metal, chicken wire, aluminum siding, rebar, large bolts, coffee cans, aluminum fruit cans, and every scrap of metal or iron and tossed them in the back of the Caprice.

She walked from lawn to lawn on the sidewalk while I inched the car along beside her. I nudged the gas pedal and braked with my tiptoes. I wasn’t big enough to see over the steering column, so I navigated through the line-of-sight between the dashboard and the top of the enormous steering wheel. When we had to cross an intersection, she’d get back in, drive across, and we’d start down the next block.