The poetic image has long been a companion of the seeking, even in its guile. Itself a thing that lies between the immediate and the ineffable, the image lends its wielding to those who wander that gulf.
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It’s a great premise for a series: journalists excavating what they left out of their reportage. May Jeong’s contribution for Off Assignment’s column, What I Didn’t Say, elucidates her experience reporting on a rash of deaths at Fort Hood, America’s largest military base.
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One consequence of relying on sight is how rarely we watch ourselves. We see our hands in motion, our reflections in mirrors, our steps beneath us, but we largely watch others. We watch television, films. Even as we try turning inward, we find ourselves looking outward.
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At the risk of getting too personal too fast—sharing something in a book review that probably should be worked out with a licensed therapist—I very much related to the internal obsession of the protagonist of Marissa Higgins’s A Good Happy Girl.
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AI, generally defined as technology able to complete functions once believed to require human skill, is a catch-all term for technology we once thought we could not hand over. The benchmark for what we imagine possible and impossible advances with each technological innovation from the chess-playing computer to ChatGPT.
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My toughest college class sounded easy—it was only a single credit and promised a trip to New York City. I was desperate to travel and liked singing, so joining choir seemed like a win-win.
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I began going to therapy after a difficult postpartum. My therapist often read incomplete sentences aloud and asked me to fill in the blanks: I like [coffee]. I regret [my birth experience]. My greatest fear is [change]. A mother is [perfect].
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When we met, I was freelancing as a photographer while finishing my degree. He was older, more established in the industry. We began dating. I saw his large-format film camera, his home darkroom, and immediately it became apparent I was an amateur.
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June 2022. The Amtrak is coming in. Its headlight down the track—closer, widening—falling across the bright afternoon. I’m hanging back on the concrete platform, not so much because it’s safer that way, but to avoid the summer rays.
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Kafka’s Metamorphosis is a kind of dream or nightmare—it’s a work of psychological anxiety, not a call for revolution. Or, at least, that’s the usual interpretation. Elizabeth R. McClellan’s poem “The Later Life of Herr Samsa’s Picture” takes a different approach: It crawls into the margins of Kafka’s story and drags out a parable about feminist working class queer solidarity, all the more precious for being found in such an unlikely place.
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Few of us know the heartache of being unable to return to the homeland that shaped us. In “Little Crane,” the narrator immortalizes her grandfather Po Po, who embodies all that she knows about her ancestral land of Burma.
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I can’t start this review without thinking about jason b. crawford’s context: A Black, queer, nonbinary human with years of experience loving and experiencing violence in America, specifically in the North and Midwest.
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While reading Jehanne Dubrow’s new collection of essays, Taste: A Book of Small Bites, published in August of 2022 by Columbia University Press, I came down with Covid and lost my senses.
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“Latasha could avoid some stalkings, but avoid them all? / Avoiding them all could mean a mean vitamin C deficiency.”
Courtney Taylor, “Concentrate”
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“Laughter shakes us out of our deadness,” Nuar Alsadir declares in her new book, Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation. Alsadir, an award-winning poet and psychoanalyst, weaves her personal experiences into critical interventions of texts like the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, Anna Karenina, and Donald Trump’s tweets to argue that laughter is a radical act of self-revelation, a means of exposing the self.
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Anxiety. Depression. Who hasn’t felt either or both at one point in their lives? But when we toss those words around carelessly, identities form.
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Queer joy. Just like there’s no singular queer experience, there’s not one definition of queer joy—its meaning is personal, individual.
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In her story “On the Train,” Lydia Davis describes a trip in which she and another passenger “are united, he and I, though strangers, against the two women in front of us talking so steadily and audibly across the aisle to each other. Bad manners.”
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In Vanessa Onwuemezi’s debut collection, Dark Neighbourhood, disaster has already come and turned out the lights. The sun has gone home early in most of the stories, and with the sun, so has gone the world, the familiarity of a home and a boundary.
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Writing a review some months after a critically acclaimed book has been released can be a challenge. Generally, all the good words have been taken, and you have to claw through the ground looking for an unused noun, surreptitiously create a new adjective out of dried grass, an errant dandelion puff, and some spit.
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