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.
“Book bans have existed as long as there have been books, throughout history, just like war. It’s a form of war; part of war; part of politics and power grabs; part of trying to keep the population ignorant and deny people books. It’s also part of antisemitism and racism and every other oppressive movement you can think of,” Donna Seaman tells interviewer Carol Haggas.
“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.
That Childhood Continent Beyond Illumination are pieces from a larger suite of automatic drawing/poem paintings, intentionally completed in an afternoon.
(art and text)
I might have lived a life or two / instead of counting steps in the parking lot, / between the rust-colored cars, / missing you.
“For Example: You’re Allergic to Bees – A community poem for Maureen Seaton” “Oyl”
(poetry)
She loved her Oxy, Hydrocodone, and Xanax, the pretty colors and shapes. She sometimes poured them all into her hand. Did she think about it? Of course, some days. It would be so easy—a glass of water, her favorite videos.
(fiction)
I was certain all was lost, that the curtain had been lifted to expose Double Take Creative for what it truly was: a two-bit operation run by a misty-eyed has-been and his oblivious minion.
(fiction)
I have not / strayed far from the dead. I see their hip favored / executives and can pick them out from big / crowds
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new books
“I collected dresses many sizes / Larger, dreamed of all the bodies crowded into those // Forms.”
Transit Authority regulations required drivers, young and old, to wear bland gray ties around the collars of our bland gray uniform shirts in addition to gray regulation sweaters and jackets, but after checking in for our routes for the day and transfer books many of us hotshots replaced our ties with tropical bandanas as a way of putting a little color into the city’s frequent gray days.
(nonfiction)
On our / walk the hound and I / noted something fecund.
(poetry)
The glass is how / we can see
(nonfiction)
One of my students asked, “Is that your cat sleeping up there?”
(nonfiction)
Addressing one of the US’s true emergencies, five former mayors told Chicago how they had reduced the murder rate in their cities.
(The Loop)
“When it comes to Brown’s latest, the White (or even in some cases Grimy) City should be proud,” Laurie Levy writes of Rosellen Brown’s “The Lake on Fire.”
Another Chicago Magazine 