Nausea knocked around my empty stomach with nothing to temper it. This woman looked just like the Wikipedia image of Edith Wharton I fell asleep to. Was I seeing pixels come to life? No. I needed to get a healthier sleep schedule now that Ramadan was over, it was clearly affecting my brain.
(fiction)
“We see these policemen over here…” The intersection above them was lined with uniformed police in crowd control gear. “…surrounding our demonstration. They say they’re here to protect and serve, but who are they protecting? Who are they serving?”
(fiction)
“I think that the beauty of Blackness and Black people is that we code-switch all the time. We just know how to talk depending on where we are and to whom we’re speaking, so I don’t think about it too much when I’m writing, but I do think about who’s going to be on the inside of the stories and who’s going to be on the outside,” Amina Gautier tells ACM.
By seventh grade students often work with percentages, fractions, probability and proportional relationships. Math looks different at our Long Covid house. We practice for survival, not standardized testing. What percentage of a medication is metabolized by the liver? By the kidneys? What fraction of the pediatric population gets well?
(nonfiction)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
Anika had, Leo knew, a harder time in the uprising than he did. She was working as a junior reporter at the morning Szabad Nep when the soldiers came, not a good place to be. She hid in the storeroom behind a trashcan for three hours listening to the shots, the clatter of shell casings on the linoleum.
(fiction)
So the day begins:
searchlight; flesh cannot repel
it, drinks; partakes; that
never hurt before.
So the day begins
with Big Bang light; no way to
penetrate its skin.
No tool can pierce it.
(poetry/translations)
As the title suggests, this is a book about vantage and perception. In several poems, the speaker takes an empathetic approach, trying to see the world through the eyes of her neurodivergent son. Elsewhere, she poses the question: “How can I teach my child to live through and/or in violence, without becoming violent themselves?”
(reviews)
The often pitch-perfect language captures the absurdity of the way we live now and renders it hilarious: “I fought a monster and defeated it. I did that. But what do you do with that? It’s not something I can post about on Facebook. I mean, my mom would see that.”
(reviews)
The way I’d savor, lovesick, a stricken voice preserved on tape as if in amber. The way I banked those messages. Playing them over and again as proof that once, I had made him care. Echo of skin and moisture and shine and shame. Power diminishing with repetition.
(nonfiction)
You cleaned buckwheat in Ukraine and you’ll continue in America. You even brought a sack of groats with you. Were you afraid you’d starve in this great capitalist country?
(nonfiction/Ukraine)
