A spectre is haunting ordinary life—the spectre of institutional decay.

Anjuli Raza Kolb’s two poems, “9/11 poem” and “Qur’anic Asterisk,” about the difficult materiality of memory and the delicacy, humor, and eros that somehow survive, even in damaged life.

Rachel Feder weaves together the sublime and the ordinary, the popular and the abstruse, the Romantic and the anti-Romantic. Really, how are celestial bodies and celebrities alike?