The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
Though I have only recently revealed myself to him, Eddie identifies me as the culprit, which kicks off a harangue: How could you do it? Why? Why? Why? and the like, all vocalized aloud.
…and while I care about respect, it isn’t my driving force, my raison d’etre, and I most certainly don’t fight police (or anyone for that matter), and in the end understand that while I am Latin, I am Hispanic, I do love Mexican music and even my dad, I formed my own sense of identity because I had to or I would have gone crazy; and perhaps, maybe, possibly, I did for a while.
(nonfiction)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
For decades, Bubbie avoided mentioning the war. Her close friends were refugees and survivors, already well acquainted with tragedy. They all had their own stories of loss and suffering, and no one wanted another.
This film explores the use of both sound and text as response and the relationship between sound and soundless answers.
(audiovisual)
To say that the often experimental stories in Amy Stuber’s “Sad Grownups” are clever, funny, and intelligently designed is accurate, but experimentation can give way to gimmickry, wittiness to cattiness, and none of that happens here.
(reviews)
The poet writes of boxes, or labels, used to define and classify Black people, especially ingrained into the psychology of young Black girls. In her prose poem “Floss (Verb),” she introduces the verb meaning “to flaunt” in her own code of language.
(reviews)
People think I’m taller than I am. Bed is a good place to be. I miss you. I think I lost something.
(audiovisual)
Rarely do we see the history of the Revolutionary War and Founding era considered in the context of Midwestern history. Most commonly, this time period’s impact on the Midwest is simply ignored…
(reviews)
Cris Mazza’s ruminations, on full display, are provocative and frequently resonant of the shared problems we women must reckon with. She challenges us to refuse to be victims, she confides a hundred petty aversions it’s satisfying to recognize.
(reviews)
Has our attempt at diplomacy boiled down to arms shipments alone? We, like the Ukrainians, just want to raise our children, and have prosperity without greed.
(nonfiction)
“Death and” is ultimately an epic fable about the relationship between its autobiographical speaker and the figure of Death as the speaker navigates plague, loss, precarious labor (sexual, manual, gig economy), and trans experience.
Part of our series of pieces inspired by the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform.
“We can recite the Preamble here,” my mother said.
“Who would hear us?” I asked.
“We can say it to the sky.”
(fiction)
Harvey’s book is like a collection of deeply intimate fables: fables that explore the past and present, familial relationships, nostalgia, and the ephemeral nature of life’s tragedies.
(reviews)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
exhausted like a French arthouse film
there’s always a male and female lead
reuniting for us
(TCTC translations/poetry)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
America didn’t go as well for Avreml as he had imagined. The assimilation process was hard for him, and it was difficult to feel at home in the big city of New York.
sundry moments now in the
crucibles of memories
memories or imagination?
(No Place is Foreign)
to know everything
and understand everything
doesn’t guarantee I’ll be able to tell the difference between poisonous and edible
(No Place is Foreign/ translations)
The man
With the cash in his pocket.
Never less than a couple hundred.
You’d never know with what
He might be armed
At any given moment
Behind the charm.
(No Place is Foreign)
Because these times are fresh paint, fresh wax, fresh garlic. These times are new grass in the same wasteland where every spring new grass grows.
(poetry/translations)
Nothing is so dangerous as a news report wherein Palestinians die in the passive voice, the horrific violence massaged into meaningless oblivion, the perpetrators somehow irrelevant.
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 and recent books:
I understand intimately how our society makes demands of women and creates the conditions that make it impossible to meet them. Being seen as a woman has been more of an annoyance than suffocation—until I became pregnant.
Part of our series of pieces inspired by the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform.
I hope the water of Lake Michigan knows the water of your body like kin. I hope there is soil under your nails, that the light of necessary fires burns luminous in your corneas.
Between us – a screen, a thirty-minute flight, / the friendly/ uncaring world, / car crashes, NATO drills
Part of our series of pieces inspired by the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform.
I tasted only / freedom, opportunity, knew little of /
all the difficult work my body would / endure to exist here, examine patriotism.
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
We are perhaps most free when we’re standing in front of an imposing wall, naming a roadblock to our own (or to our neighbor’s) full humanity and then throwing ourselves against that obstacle.
Part of our series of pieces inspired by the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform.
in America under a big chandelier that fills my chest with ice
Blond women selling their hair injure their faces to produce
an altered shapeliness, their lips a pert woodland scene
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
how anne frank would’ve been a belieber
& ur body beneath all those clothes
the color of my skin being important
to everyone but me
Part of our series of pieces inspired by the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform.
I am longleaf pine, soybean
and cotton fields. I am not American.
(poetry)
a dandelion doesn’t remember
when it sprouted
or how it ended up
in this yard.
(poetry/translations)
Another Chicago Magazine 