The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
He had written DECEASED next to my mother’s name on his return. That threw the whole system off, sending his return into the void for further review. Since the entire IRS was working from home due to Covid-19, which arrived approximately two weeks after my mother’s death, apparently every day was now Leap Day, and perhaps in another four years my father might get his refund.
This collection of poems explores the fracture of a marriage after a secret is revealed—a husband’s closeted homosexuality, at odds with his religious upbringing and the life he has built. Set against the pastoral backdrop of stables and gardens, canning jars and roving horses, tether & lung traverses the landscape of loss and longing with striking vulnerability.
(reviews)
I am sorry to say this, but what if You made a mistake?
What if You took the wrong kid?
I heard You took two more kids today from Askar’s middle school.
Are the soldiers working for you?
(Palestinian Voices/ fiction)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
I walk across the highway to the other side, lean over the same crumbling concrete guardrail and look down into the stagnant cesspool. As I slowly raise my head, I follow the canal as it extends in a straight line out to Lake Michigan. The huge, shadowy metal structures of the steel makers stand along the shore, and next to them, barely visible, a towering crane.
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
Every night I read
My country’s history
of profit wrung from working people
and before dawn I burn my shoes
If God appears on these pages, it is in the sacred clarity of the concrete detail. The speaker as a young girl, drawing ankhs and peace signs in the back of her bible, listening to a hymn as it slides beneath the pews.
(reviews)
Discovering Tarkovsky upended my attempt to build a coherent, if radically reduced, worldview post-Iraq. Ten years after leaving the military I found myself replaying certain scenes from his Solaris and Stalker well into the early morning hours, with no thought to plot, or social relevance, just the sound and absence and the want and the curious, sacred fullness that followed these unanchored gaps in experience.
(nonfiction)
“What do you know of killing a child?” Medea shouted, her voice trembling with the hereafter. The woman bowed her head, circling endlessly over rocky ground, stacking stones, whispering absence and omission as her weapons, searching for forgiveness that would never come.
(translations)
The film is a collection of footage accumulated from days walking around Chicago and noticing the different movements, colors, and forms of the city. It attempts to embody a dissociated state of mind.
(audiovisual)
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)
