Defunct

The discovery of the day is the online journal Defunct: A Literary Repository for the Ages, a biannual out of the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program.

I, for one, love literary nonfiction almost as much as I love poetry (and at least as much as I love fiction), so I am delighted to find such a high-quality magazine devoted to this art. Featuring some of my favorite nonfiction writers including the form-bending Ander Monson, David Shields, and Sven Birkerts, this journal is the reason I haven't gotten much work done this morning.

Plenty of poets seem to also shine in this genre, including Lia Purpura, Mark Yakich, and Judith Kitchen.

Poet Daniel Nester's "Late Night Thoughts on My Dead Thyroid" should be required reading for anyone with thyroid dysfunction, or anyone who knows someone with thyroid dysfunction (and that's all of you, since you "know" me or actually know me).

Oh, and there's a theme: yes, you guessed it: things which are defunct (which is a rather nervy theme for an online journal, wouldn't you say?)

But we like nervy writing (if not nervy writers), don't we? (And yes, nervy writers too. We admit it.) In short, head on over to Defunct right away. (Or, as Kurt Vonnegut would have me say, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’)