How to Write an Essay is an attempt for the time being. These poems take seriously John D'Agata's question-and-answer: "What is a lyric essay? It's an oxymoron: an essay that's also a lyric; a kind of logic that wants to sing; an argument that has no chance of proving anything." Trying and failing, in other words, is a complete poetics. In lyrics and broken prose, Lucy Xiang-fu Wainger interrogates desire, memory, the dialectic between thinking and feeling, and what it means to have once been a child. Read and know that you are the exact, specific person to whom she is speaking.