Contending Forces
1. In the December 1900 edition of The Colored American Magazine, published seven months after its debut issue, there is an illustration of a Southern Black family breaking bread on Christmas Day. Drawn by Guyanese artist J. Alexandre Skeete, the picture accompanies “A Christmas Reunion,” a poem by journalist Augustus M. Hodges which details the […]
Read MoreWord Crimes
Read MoreAn Interview with S.W. Lauden
S.W. Lauden is a multi-hyphenate with at least two names. As Steve Coulter, he’s the former drummer for power popping punk combo Tsar. That band was mostly active in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, though they experienced a brief resurgence in the early ‘10s when their guitarmony-laden single “Calling All Destroyers” was featured in […]
Read MoreStuck
I’m in the ballroom of a Boston hotel, trying to play it like I deserve to be there, when someone decides that we will go around the room and introduce ourselves. Thud, the dread hits first in my chest. I am a stutterer, and this is my worst-case scenario. I’m the lone PR rep among […]
Read MoreDaddy Issues in the Fantasy Zone
Every Final Fantasy game starts with a Guy. Sometimes the game names him, but usually, you do. You assume that, like you, he’s just an ordinary Guy, but it turns out he’s imbued with extraordinary magical powers and is destined to save the world. Your Guy meets some other people along the way—the cunning thief, […]
Read MoreA Poem from Allison Titus
IT WILL ALL WORK OUT OKAY Once I hiked partway up a glacier on the other side of a duststorm just north of Vik far offI could see the sandy fields & the shaggy horsesthat roamed them could see the seams of their breath liftinglittle signals into the weep of it all I […]
Read MoreTwo Poems from Tomaž Šalamun
Tomaž Šalamun (1941-2014) published more than 55 books of poetry in Slovenia. Translated into over 25 languages, his poetry received numerous awards, including the Jenko Prize, the Prešeren Prize, the European Prize for Poetry, and the Mladost Prize. In the 1990s, he served for several years as the Cultural Attaché for the Slovenian Embassy in […]
Read MoreWhat’s Not in a Name?
Read MoreSurviving in America
Read MoreLa Folía
oh clack yourmetal wings, god,you are mine now in the morning. “A Poem for Record Players,” John Wieners, 1958 I. One of my cousins sometimes fainted. Dr. Wickramasinghe thought being born blue with the cord in a stranglehold around the neck and touch and go for weeks was behind the boy’s syncope, and […]
Read MoreJ for Jim Crow
Read MoreAdaptations: Film, from the Page and the Stage
Film: The Women, screenplay by Anita Loos and Jane Murfin, directed by George Cukor, 1939 Play: Femmes: A Tragedy by Gina Young, 2013 Adapted From: The Women by Clare Boothe Luce, 1936 “No one misses a clever woman,” remarks Nancy in The Women’s first scene. She’s the ensemble’s confirmed bachelorette, an adventuring writer who hovers above […]
Read MoreAdaptations: Film, from the Page and the Stage
Film: Up Close and Personal, directed by Jon Avnet, adapted by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne (1996) Adapted from: Golden Girl: The Jessica Savitch Story, by Alanna Nash, first edition 1988 Also discussed: Monster: Living off the Big Screen, by John Gregory Dunne, 1997 Why is it that literary adaptations make for the most […]
Read MoreBeasts of Burden
I’m in Williamsburg, Virginia, eating lunch with my mom and younger brother when the Olympic dressage competition begins. “I don’t understand how this is a sport,” my brother comments, twisting around to watch a muscled bay with rider spring forward on the HDTV behind us. Neck reined to a curve, the bay completes a neat […]
Read MoreAn Interview with Anne Elizabeth Moore
In 2014, I won a writing competition where the award was a newly renovated home in Detroit. In the years following my move, the now-defunct program also awarded two nonfiction writers houses in my neighborhood, Liana Agahjanian and Anne Elizabeth Moore. The opening pages of Anne’s memoir Gentrifier recollect the day she moved to Detroit, […]
Read MoreLightning Strike
This article isn’t clickbait. It’s about the meaning of life and if God is real and all kinds of other cool stuff. Just wanted you to know. Like sand through the hourglass, so are the clickbaits of our lives. Maybe you’re reading this at work, sitting on the toilet, lid down. Thank you. Or maybe […]
Read MoreAn Interview with Janice Lee
Imagine a Death, Janice Lee’s sixth book, disrupts the death-discourse by making it actively spiral. Blake Butler’s blurb for this work collaborates with my own thoughts. “The result is the greatest work to-date of one of America’s most elemental voices and death-defiers, a kind lamp that breaks the dark.” Lee, a Korean-American writer, editor, teacher, […]
Read MoreGeophagy at Red Earth Hole
In the morning, I walk through my neighborhood and enter an opening into the forest. After a few steps, I leave the main path and discover a nice slice of earth, undisturbed by the traffic of human footsteps. Here the soil looks new and loamy, like crumbles of chocolate cake. I remove a metal spoon […]
Read MoreA Poem by Dan Chelotti
You Can Only Learn From So Many People Reading, I didn’tNotice how the crowdWas all down the otherEnd of the subway platform.Someone had put a pieceOf creased cardboardOver the dead woman’sFace and I had to studyHer for a long minuteBefore I knew sheWas dead. The crowd wasStaring. I couldn’t face them.I couldn’t walk any closerTo […]
Read MoreJorge Castillo and Nancy Alfaya in Conversation
Jorge Olivera Castillo is currently a City of Asylum Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas, where he is writing a book of short stories based on his experiences as a soldier in a civil war in Angola that took place between 1974-1989, where Cuba supported one of the sides in the conflict. […]
Read MoreAn Interview with Joss Lake
I had been following Joss Lake around, accidentally, for nearly two years before we actually met. He was a year ahead of me in the fiction track at Columbia, and he preceded me as an editor at Conjunctions—I joined the masthead about a month into his absence. I don’t remember the circumstances of our first […]
Read MoreThe Good, The Ben, and the Ugly
Netanyahu is history to begin with. The consignment of the ninth prime minister of Israel to the history books was ultimately engineered by the most unlikely coalition in the Knesset. The alliance’s chief purpose, it seems, was to sweep corruption-prone Bibi under the proverbial rug—maybe the rug of history. Great men tend to become history, […]
Read MoreSteve Dain Drive
Read MoreAnother Precarious Time
I went to Gregg Bordowitz’s show I Wanna Be Well looking for answers. I can’t recommend this as a way to approach an exhibition, and I can’t say I was totally conscious of it when I arrived. I am not conscious of everything now. My brain holds on to information only briefly. I ascribe this […]
Read MoreAn Interview with Katie Kitamura
I haven’t yet had the pleasure of meeting Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies, in person—as a result of the pandemic and travel restrictions. This interview was conducted with Katie over email. I’ve long been a reader of her work and she is equally a relentless philosopher of language as she is a pure storyteller—whose sculpted […]
Read MoreThe Return
Every day for the last month, I have hypnotized myself. In this state, I am unable to open my eyes — the harder I try, the heavier they get—and so, I relax into submission. Then, step by step, I descend an imaginary staircase into the dark basement of my subconscious. My limbs and thoughts become […]
Read MoreAn Interview with Michael Lesy
“When you photograph a moment, you’re photographing the death of that moment.” There’s a scene in the Oscar-winning 1978 film Ordinary People in which an affluent but deeply dysfunctional family attempts to take a few simple snapshots during a holiday gathering. We all know the ritual, but here you can feel the tension ratchet up […]
Read MoreSandbox Games in a Locked-Down World
Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla is, ostensibly, a viking simulator—you play as Eivor, who, depending on your preference, is either a Violent, Terse Viking Man or a Violent, Terse Viking Woman. After an extended sequence in the ice-sharpened mountains of Norway, you’re dumped into pastoral England in the late 9th century, where you plunder countless monasteries, burn […]
Read MoreAn Interview with Joey Yearous-Algozin
When I saw Joey Yearous-Algozin had a book coming out this summer I was surprised and intrigued. I had encountered some of Joey’s poetry through Troll Thread, the publishing collective and press co-founded by him, Holly Melgard, Chris Sylvester, and Divya Victor, embracing the friction between free pdfs and print-on-demand books, and as a politically […]
Read MoreAn Interview with Hatty Nestor
Writer and critic Hatty Nestor spent her childhood between the council estates of Essex and the desert landscapes of New Mexico. This experience of existing between two places, and her exposure to how criminalized people are portrayed in each of them, informs her first book Ethical Portraits: In Search of Representational Justice, published by Zero […]
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