"Just as I had begun to think Emre’s preferences for personal essays would be disastrous if applied to poetry—because I see poetry as, among other things, consciousness put down on the page—her parsing of Gaitskill’s “mechanicalness” and the importance of being vigilant of its myriad tentacles makes perfect sense when we remember that the worst poetry often mines clichés, the mechanical and rote accommodation of predictable ideation around (as above) dating, the social mediatization of one’s ideas or real-life experience, sexual mores, coolness, troubling political realities, etc.”Nyla Matuk • Berfrois

---