Three Books that Will Transport You

The poem is about how our most worthwhile pursuits--things like art, love, and beauty--often seem to demand a measure of toil. Or, as a woman in the poem wistfully puts it, how "we must labour to be beautiful." The speaker reflects that "I strove / To love you in the old high way of love." He sounds tired from the effort. Then I read my colleague Hanif Abdurraqib's gorgeous essay about our collective longing for inconvenience, in which he discusses a friend who "wants to fall in love," meaning without using a dating app.