The Latest
Don’t Let Them Eat Cake
The Supreme Court’s Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling continues a terrible trend of valuing businesses more than employees and customers.
Tree Frogs
One starts. The still heat is a blown curtain.
The curtain wavers then—now two of them—
and another from beyond the blue agave.
Soon the whistling, wheet-eet-eet, the many,
Miss America
At dawn when traffic lights burn like roses
I feel pity akin to love
For the little deviants of wild
Turkeys skulking around this city.
Proof of Hunger
I feed my body less and want more the surplus
I was promised storehouses of grain plains of locust
don’t signify a thing without hunger
telos that defers its own ending
The Persistence of Torture
The dog violet, pressing a flat ear to the ground,
has news of great importance:
it is spring
and jealousy turns its blade again.
from “The Prospect”
the river was central
each branch arterial
pulling land along with it
in form of pebbles, sand, agglomerate
Elegy with Forest and TVs
Men surrounded by lumber and nails, then suddenly a house with two kids, a dog, swing set
and barbeque, spinning on its street among other homes
on the green grass of this planet.
Young Blue Heron
One thing to do
until you can’t
is wait, foot tentative
testing for deceit
What Is the Anthropocenester?
1. Crisis is a rusted minivan throwing down spike strips on the highway of teleology. The Anthropocenester is in the passenger seat.
2. Crisis bangs on the table and demands immediate action in the form of risk management or hazard mitigation. The Anthropocenester wipes up the coffee that spilled.
from “A Wilderness”
Yes, I did hold a plague in my pupils. Yes, I did lift up my dress and walk through fields to kill each beetle and pest. The last landscape designated protected was the swamp. The marsh and its salt, weedy tufts of grass stuck up above the flood.
A Letter from Deborah Chasman and Joshua Cohen
After reports concerning Junot Díaz, Boston Review’s fiction editor, came to light last month, we dug deeply into the accounts and reached out to women writers of color in the literary community.
The Defeat of Reason
Two new books—one on quantum physics, one on Thomas Kuhn—seek to reestablish the authority of reason and evidence.
The Market Police
Neoliberals need state power to enforce market relations. To protect it from democratic control, the site of that power must be hidden from politics.