Ancient Jars
Baptize yourself in the promise that every moment might ring with the ecstasy of leftovers fitting just perfectly into a takeout carton.
from “No Measure”
I’m also an instrument. My wingspan, another measure. I spread my palm beside the grass. What fraction of me is the height of this?
Working Class Unionism; Some Exclusions Apply: On Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol’s “Rust Belt Union Blues”
Their analysis lends itself to an intentionally divisive strand of right wing populism that profits from cleaving the white male working-class from a broader multiracial, feminist, and unified working-class—one that might actually have the power to upend capital’s clutches.
How Creative was Creativity's Midcentury Moment?: On Samuel Franklin’s “The Cult of Creativity”
The concept’s opaqueness allowed users to commit neither to the elite circles and institutions that lauded its virtues, nor to the egalitarian sensibilities that insisted creativity was a latent trait evenly distributed across the population.
Money, Merit, and the Economy of Favors: Three Proposals to Improve Class Diversity in the Literary Community
Perhaps the literary community needs a lot more of the absurd, even in spades, and perhaps especially in relation to economics.
Shrimp Crystal Flavor Packets
a conceptual shrimp uses its limbs to reshape the reader’s mind, mounding and clefting your mental world until it is the mental world of some other creature: shark, scallop, arthropod boiled down to pure flavor crunch.
Question as Action: On “Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah”
What, then, do Jews who are invested both in being in lockstep with the Palestinian struggle and in our Jewish cultural lives do with our Judaism?
Paris, of, Appalachia (or How to Bet on Two Words and Lose)
Linguists trace the means by which, they say, Black Pittsburghers use language to position themselves relative to, and against, whiteness. The idea that white speech might be made and maintained in order to create racial difference is unexplored.
Courting Opposition: On Three Books from Changes Press
By the end of the book, we have arrived at the beginning, this introduction to a kind of refractory methodology.
Spilled Oil: On Lydia Kiesling’s “Mobility”
What Mobility offers is a model for centering the personal in a way that amplifies, rather than obfuscates, its political context.
Talking Birds
It was my mother who taught me that hummingbirds don’t sleep: they fall into a state called torpor, which is deeper than sleep, more akin to hibernation.
High Fidelities: On Some Recent Translator’s Notes
Hard at work in a culture more dedicated to vocational mythologizing than repairing structural supports.
A Tally of Ghosts: On Gabriel Palacios’ “A Ten Peso Burial For Which Truth I Sign”
Palacios’ lyrics carefully excavate, document, and interpellate through such questions, interrogating what a peopled coexistence could possibly mean when, amidst modern exigencies.
The Transitive Property of Love: On Toby Altman’s “Discipline Park”
I feel jealous of Toby Altman for being so obsessed with this topic, which makes his poetry a “serious project.” I worry I am only serious about my love for people.
“First Funeral in Four Months” and “On Visiting Aunt Rosa & Car Racing”
I’m a little out of the loop.
Before the service, I buy breath mints
instead of flowers.
I wear the wrong shoes.
I leave my facial tissue in the car.
Witnessing the Witnesses: On Hanif Abdurraqib’s “There’s Always This Year”
Running through “There’s Always This Year” is a strong biblical motif. God (sometimes capitalized, sometimes not), savior, prayer, mercy, miracles, redemption, salvation, and eternity all permeate the book.
Shear Defiance: On Andrew Drummond’s “The Dreadful History and Judgement of God on Thomas Müntzer”
By making Müntzer a scapegoat, Catholics and Lutherans cemented his reputation as an uncompromising iconoclast. This image only made the preacher more appealing to later generations of radicals.
Sacred, Perilous Movement: On Breaking
We must go beyond the tired narratives of cultural exploitation or commercial gentrification that tend to dominate discourse.
Ways of Seeing: On John Berger’s “Cataract”
It is both within the custom of writerly sight, then, and a cruel irony, that Berger, whose popularity is most connected to Ways of Seeing, would later come to develop cataracts in both eyes.
from “Vague Predictions & Prophecies”
I couldn’t see anything but I could hear that the pasture was now moving, alive with women. I started to run before a hand stopped me, landing across my chest.