Dean Bakopoulos: We Never Close: A Heartbroken Manifesto against Tidiness, Resolution, and Brevity (January 2016)

Dean Bakopoulos examines work fueled by heartbreak so surreal it cannot follow the tidy or predictable forms of traditional stories and poems. Instead, the work rambles, digresses, glosses over the important, elevates the mundane, forces a form, and then kicks the form apart. Looking at work by Lorrie Moore, Edward Hirsch, and James Baldwin, Bakopoulos explores how such works manipulate the reader and build conflict, even in the absence of plot.