Uncover the Hidden Truths of Creativity and Suffering in Alex Boyd’s Latest Essay Collection
When I came to Alex Boyd’s Take This for the Pain: Essays on Writing and Life (Palimpsest Press; June 2026), I found myself reaching for an equivalent term for prose that takes writing and the writer’s life as its subject. Perhaps such a term exists, but I came up empty. It helps that Boyd is a poet as well as a prose writer, someone who has spent a writing life reading widely, reviewing carefully, and reflecting on what that life means.
The book he has made from that practice falls unmistakably within the tradition of the ars poetica, transposed into prose and spread across decades, an ars scribendi if you will, from the Latin meaning the art of writing.
Post Comment