Criticism
The Critic of Gay Desire
Why groundbreaking queer studies scholar Leo Bersani rejected the word “queer.”
Rewild Earth
Kemi Alabi’s Against Heaven answers generations of spiritual violence and threatened damnation with reclamation, repopulation, and a redefinition of heaven.
Magritte’s Prophetic Surrealism
No other artist more perfectly anticipated the banal strangeness of life in the twenty-first century.
West Side Story and the Tragedy of Progressive Hollywood
A “woke” remake that peddles in symbolic representation is not the film Puerto Ricans deserve.
The In-Between of Environmental Crisis
Two recent essay collections explore the interplay between literary genre and a rapidly changing planet.
The Invisible Hand of Greg Tate
Robin D. G. Kelley and Bongani Madondo honor the writer’s life, work, and legacy.
Whose Anthropocene?
Because it hinges on who will accept blame for causing climate change, there’s never been so much at stake in the naming of a geological era.
How Domestic Labor Robs Women of Their Love
The glaring omission in recent works depicting the agonies of nannying and housekeeping.
Elegies for Empire
We can find reconciliation and closure in poetry, despite the forces that engender grief and dispossession. Three new poetry collections refuse the binaries and amnesia that so often characterize American mourning.
The Sounds of Struggle
The pathbreaking jazz album from Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, and Oscar Brown, Jr., that fused politics and art in the fight for Black liberation.
Everyday Mojo Letters to Yusef
A series of creative reflections on why Yusef Komunyakaa remains one of our greatest living writers and what it means to be a Black Jazz Poet.
Mike Nichols and the American Century
The director’s life reflected both the feats and the failures of the postwar U.S. experience.
Working on Our Primal Scream
Amidst a boys’ club of ’70s-era comics, Shary Flenniken’s Trots and Bonnie was unique for its feminist depiction of the political and sexual awakening of young women.
Adrienne Rich’s Solitudes
Critics tend to discount Rich’s later poems, fundamentally misunderstanding how they engage her radical vision of community.
Autofiction’s First Boom Was in Turn-of-the-Century Japan
Newly translated into English, Minae Mizumura’s An I-Novel is a vivid portrait of immigrant displacement and the ironies of our global cultural ecosystem.
Poetry in the Critical Zone
In a new book of lyric essays, poet Cole Swensen answers a call issued by theorists Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel: to reimagine the globe in terms of the fragile surface ecosystems that support all life.
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