Meghan O’Rourke, a former editor at
The New Yorker
and Slate, is the author of the poetry collections
Once
and
Halflife
and a memoir,
The Long Goodbye
. Her poetry and essays have appeared in
The New York Times
,
The New Republic
,
The New York Review of Books
, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the inaugural May Sarton Poetry Prize, and teaches at NYU and Princeton.
This piece first appeared as the introduction to the New York Review of Books reprint of Joan Chase's glorious first novel, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia, which was released today. Joan Chase is a musical writer, and in a sense her luminous, stark, and startling novel
During the Reign of the Queen of Persia
, first published in 1983, is a kind of pagan Middle American chorale—a song of childhood, a song…
