I like art best when its artifice dissolves. Pull back the curtain: It’s me, looking sheepish. Which me is almost irrelevant: I’ll answer to any name you call. Surrendering is only erotic when what you’ve held inside too long has named you. Made you its shape.
(nonfiction)
Can violence be made into beauty? Can beauty be used to dignify the stain of violence? Sloan seems to suggest so, perhaps, by conceiving of Ophelia’s body as part of nature—indistinguishable from it.
(reviews)
Shiki wrote haiku—tens of thousands of haiku—elevating himself to the immortal ranks of Bashō, Issa, and his personal hero, Buson. However, Shiki did not want to go back to the past and its masters; he wanted to reinvent what he believed was a dying art.
(reviews)
Part of a series of Native poetry collected by Mark Turcotte.
Springtime is for the seeds and letting light into the home our spirits live in. We prep the soil for the ones who sleep there. Summer picks berries for playtime.
(poetry)
if the Earth would just split in two
& one half would take its leave
I’d take a seat on the other half
& absorb the blue skies above
(translations/poetry)
Farmwork required
strong hands and body
not the somersaults
of ABCs in the mind.
(No Place is Foreign)
Some art just makes you think instantly of the seven deadly sins. Not because they traffic in, say, lust, but because they arouse feelings in you with such painful precision that it seems some dark magic has occurred.
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new books
“I wish I could once again see / your benches where the weary come to sit / and watch their burdens bloom into butterflies.”
He wonders if his life has been a lie. Was he ever really a selenophile? Were the yearly parades a waste of time? The protests. The fights for equality.
(fiction)
Now all I want is to / hear what Paul Thomas Anderson whispered into Fiona / Apple’s ear to make her cry in public.
“Humor is so essential to having a well-maintained psyche, because if we take ourselves too seriously, we’re probably going to be miserable,” Christine Sneed tells interviewer Kathryn O’Day.
He moved close enough to whiff my aftershave. Our eyes met before he grimaced.
(fiction)
It was late in the evening and dark, the dark river with its lights passing by, reflections from the Seine travelling across the ceiling, sliding along the walls.
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new books
“It was bleak, and I had no idea how we could translate it to a kids’ show about a talking monkey, but I was jazzed.”
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new books
“We didn’t think to ask / what we might lose, / what it would cost us”
“If I go into the forest, I can hear the birds and crunching of the leaves. It’s about the sound of the whole forest, not isolating the sounds,” Janice Lee tells interviewer Margaret Juhae Lee.
But the answer, I like to think, is that the Raven Grill offers not so much “nevermore” but “furthermore.”
(nonfiction)
They trained me up, taught me how to alpha. Posture, voice, aspect. Then they gave me all the accouterments. Even I was impressed with myself afterward.
(fiction)
Performing for the troops, who were more and more dazed and battered as the days went on, Cohen found a kind of personal artistic and spiritual redemption, and the soldiers for whom he performed, touched and a little awed by his presence there (as were the musicians who accompanied him), did, too.
(reviews)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new books
“Folklore across the African diaspora maintains that captive Africans were born with the ability to fly.”
(nonfiction)
“If a doctor says, ‘The curve of your spine makes me think of a river, or a snake in action,’ that would make me feel like part of nature instead of an unnatural aberration,” Riva Lehrer tells interviewer Irina Ruvinsky.
Now the extent of my friend’s madness was clear. I couldn’t understand how I’d failed to realize it earlier.
(fiction/translation)
His job was merely to photograph: to catalogue the state of the problem. Save the radiology for radiologists.
(fiction)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new books
“No, I went through one marriage,” Aunt Mildred insisted to the jury of her siblings. “I won’t make that mistake again.”
(nonfiction)
She didn’t go to a hospital—with the traffic in Bogotá, she’s sure she would have ended up giving birth in a taxi!
(fiction)
I trip on cobblestones sticking out of the earth like busted tombstones.
(nonfiction)
Another Chicago Magazine 