I only hope we may sometime meet and I shall be able perhaps to say what I cannot write.
– Bram Stoker to Walt Whitman, February 1876


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‘Behind every man I want to kiss lies that original desire, which it is my nature and my fate to displace.’
I only hope we may sometime meet and I shall be able perhaps to say what I cannot write.
– Bram Stoker to Walt Whitman, February 1876
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‘There’s this paradoxical nostalgia where even though yi suffered, yi miss it.’
Memoir by Graeme Armstrong.
‘She boils her sentences down to high-sucrose sweeties and calibrates her tone for maximum engagement.’
Fiction by Natasha Brown.
‘The monstrous years of my late teens lay lined up alongside the rest of my life like bullets in a gun.’
A story by Sophie Mackintosh.
‘Without waiting for me she removes her white shirt. Each button a piece of my own spine, undone.’
Fiction by K Patrick.
‘I followed him onto the dancefloor and he put his hands on my hips as if he’d known me for at least an hour.’
Fiction by Saba Sams.
Mark Doty is the author of eight poetry collections including, Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008 and My Alexandria, which won the 1995 T. S. Eliot Prize. What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life will be published in April 2020. He lives in New York City.
Photograph © Rachel Eliza Griffiths
‘an orange plastic basket of compost / down from the top of the garden – sweet dark, / fibrous rot, promising’
‘When I was seventeen, a freshman in college living in my parents’ house, I met Ruth at a poetry reading.’
‘Does it make you a little ghostly yourself, when what’s gone is more present for you than what’s here?’
Will Self and Mark Doty's discussion with Granta publisher Sigrid Rausing about blood, the surprising relationship between Bram Stoker and Walt Whitman and the nature of addiction.
‘oh dirty feet blood-clotter / oh grease monkey clod-hopper / oh cloud-devourer spit’
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