You make up
the better part
of an expression

The best stories are about people who we don’t really know but think we could. Had we gone to that party we missed; had we been born without that mole.

Culpability is offloaded onto the very idea of science itself: unfeeling, inhuman, inevitable. These warnings do not allow for human ingenuity or variety of thought; they cannot imagine another way. But it’s a poor craftsman who blames his tools.

to What are you susceptible by description

the there there, when it repeats

The text contends that there is such a thing as public space, and that the poet can intervene in it. Moreover, it asserts that Buffalo—a poor, working-class city in the Rust Belt, crumbling from decades of neglect—is capable of ecstatic beauty.

There are no shoulds besides making marks on a page and arranging those words in a particular order; what’s left is a condition of the present, of taste which cannot exactly be spoken to before it changes.

do we live here — wedreamstories&scenesbutwedontlivethem (Notley) — or here — ppleatcronuts&frankoceanieatbusilybetweenyourlegs (Chang)

And maybe that brings us to the myth of chronology: linear time equals progression. No. There is no linear progression and we’re reproducing subjection again and again.

Writing histories of struggle alongside imagined futures of collective care, there is no isolated subject. Silt’s essays and poems serve as a sprawling manifesto, showcasing the peculiarities of pleasure under capitalism.

Such as, I keep misreading these preceding instances of the term “a****-g****” as “agnès-varda.”

Supposing maybe this is all anybody ought to be asking.

Hašek is mocking authority and bourgeois respectability, of course, but the criticism is ultimately of the individual’s inability to tolerate being the butt of a joke. If the universe is absurd, then we shouldn’t be so foolish as to take it seriously.

To squabble over genre would be to take away from the very potent delight of these kinds of tales: a capacity to traverse an enormous affective range, to play lightly at the surface of life and to sink to tragic human depths.

Consider this pamphlet a set of buyer’s notes, a thorough investigation under the orders of academizing burglars. The question you must then ask yourself is: is the nicest door a door one can buy, a door one must take, or a door one must build?

Their most valuable contribution comes not from extrapolating what “Thoreau would say” about contemporary problems, but in showing where his ideas can lead us when paired with a more robust sense of class consciousness and a stronger drive for action.

In a time of ever-escalating state violence towards intersex, gender non-conforming, and trans people, what do cis scholars writing about gender owe their subjects?

The most beguiling aspect of My Search for Warren Harding is the way Plunket manages to discount the meaning of romance, literature, and history to such an extent that none much help us read his novel.

“An Elemental Rust,” says Dickinson. I grew it on the inside of a can. A rustling effect. A chandelier. A .22. Its cartridges. A bit of window screen patching a screen and a dried bee. A contact lens.

Rather than a rurality for tourists, a land recast as a bourgeois playground pervaded by natural and cultural heritage, Cain attempts a rurality that is grotesque and potent. He performs a pastoral contaminated by history.

The show narrates queer and trans characters in ways that negate old tropes about being stuck in the closet in backwards small-town America. They are simply unglamorous, everyday people.

Taylor’s characters fail to reconcile deeper emotional desires with the reality that their immediate environment is not a place to escape, but rather the very territory in which “real life” happens.