Columns
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“a desire, a desire”: Appetite & Obsession in Summer Farah’s “The Hungering Years”
This repetition evokes an incantation, signaling the recursive and often reverent nature of the speaker’s desire. For Farah’s speaker—and for many living in diaspora—longing is an ongoing ritual, an inheritance. Ending the poem with a comma, Farah leaves the reader…
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To My Date at Wonder Bar
“I don’t know how to capture my curiosity about forms of relationality that defy familiar, ossified shapes when I don’t even have the language for fluidity. How can I name the intimacies on which I don’t want to slap the…
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Saibin (the Visitation of Our Lady)
Our Lady’s journey began, as it did each year—even in our time—at the chapel of our village of Arossim, and would move from there to each house in the village. Our Lady was encased in a tiny wooden chamber, for…
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With Both Anxiety & Self-Importance: The Lasting Resonance of “One, None, and a Hundred Grand”
Contemporary readers can relate to Vitangelo, as social media seems designed to focus on what others think of us.
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The First Book: Carrie R. Moore
“I’m writing for readers who love emotional resonance. I’m not writing to teach anyone anything about race or history; instead, my book is for readers who want to see Black people living their lives. My ideal readers can also make…
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A Cacophony of Crowns: “cells, fully differentiated” by Kinsey Cantrell
Before venturing into Cantrell’s poetic narrative, the 9×7-inch poetic design of the collection presents symmetrical squared concrete poems encouraging disarray to the reading experience. Where one’s reading experience may take place traditionally across the page from left to right, the…
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The First Book: Sam Sussman
“It’s easy to think that when writing from life, the story is intuitive. That was not my experience. Life is not literature. I had to look carefully at what I had written and ask, “Am I writing this because it…
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What Resists the Burn Barrel: A Conversation with Mickie Kennedy
“Trust that the reader is intelligent enough to hop through time: moving back and forth between child and adult speakers. Freed of chronology, I immediately felt like “The Pact” would be a great opening for the book: intense, aggressive, grounding…
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Queer Joy, Intimacy, and Living in a Disabled Body: Rob Macaisa Colgate’s “Hardly Creatures”
I entered this book as one would enter an art gallery– clueless, curious, and slightly apprehensive. Very quickly though, the book held my hand and taught me how to read it. As in an art gallery, the book guides the…
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A Consideration of “Vanya”
Except that Andrew Scott plays all eight characters. A page in the playbill explains that the one-man-show idea occurred accidentally during readings of Stephens’ straight version. ‘It turns out when one person [does it], when there was one voice,’ Scott…
