Politics
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Children in Numbers
At Guernica, poet Susan Briante shares a personal, lyric essay on motherhood in a system—our own—undergirded by the valuation of children. “Dusk traffics light, the light scans her” becomes “The market scans my child, calculates pecuniary value.”
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Mansplained to Hell
Writers Dorthe Nors and Jarett Kobek discuss politics, Nors’s life in Denmark, writing on the Internet, women writers, and more over at Electric Literature: When you said that about a woman writing I Hate the Internet and ATTA, I felt…
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Trump, New Yorker Style
Andrew Boynton applies the New Yorker‘s stringent copyediting rules to a statement from Donald Trump “in the interest of clarity.”
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Anna March’s Reading Mixtape #20: Greats
Great strides, great artists, great desires, great complexity—this week’s books are all about these kinds of greats. They also all showcase exceptional writing and take us far and wide—from elective politics to abstract art, from Coney Island to California—to explore…
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Books vs. Extremism
At Electric Literature, Je Banach explores how literary discourse can “break down barriers” in a time of political extremism: Literary discourse, the active process of carefully considering the words and ideas of others and then speaking thoughtfully and critically about them—let…
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Death and Politics
John Williams inspects the literary themes of love and death, and, in the same article, suggests a few reads as we enter the presidential primaries: Even readers less snarky than Wilde can be forgiven if fictional expirations meet with less…
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The Rumpus Interview with Mira Ptacin
Author Mira Ptacin discusses her memoir Poor Your Soul, what inspires her to write, motherhood, and why she considers her beat “the uterus and the American Dream.”
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The Charismatic Loser
I think it would be a great time for men, basically, to go on vacation. Eileen Myles is interviewed by the New York Times, touching on poetry’s place in politics, and men’s place in either: open femaleness, memorable lines, and…
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The Rumpus Interview with Meline Toumani
Meline Toumani discusses her debut, There Was and There Was Not, the rewards and risks of writing a political memoir, and what it means to approach a divided past and future.
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Fresh Comics #8: John Black’s Body
In the imagined scenario wherein my apartment burns to the ground and I lose all my worldly possessions, there are just a few things I would miss—family photographs (of course), an old wooden trunk my grandmother reupholstered and that I used…
