most days, during some mid-day hour, / I close my eyes and say the Sh’ma. / But it’s always the wrong time of day, / and it’s the only prayer I know

A long line of films tracks the solidarities that arise when prohibition makes friendship too perilous.

I resolved to stay close to my mother.

She described their world at last in a language that they recognized as true.

Chantal Johnson’s debut novel, Post-Traumatic, makes the case that we can—by moving away from representations of individual suffering.

It’s a thing about being a man. To be so stingy, to deny even a sip of yourself. To deny and deny and deny until one day it all comes out as a violence, like water spewing forth from a hose. 

When you weren’t sure if a guy was gay, you asked if he was Canadian. The straight ones always look puzzled, and told you they were American.

I’m not sure anymore / how far joy gets us

We knew language better than anybody, how you could crack it out of fortune cookies or loop it into a rhythm or rip it to shreds and make money off the confetti. 

a presenter / interrupts a program to break the news of migrants / found dead on the shores of river niger. i look down / the streets through my window.

The novel Kindred reminds us—emphatically, gruesomely—that white supremacy is us too.

What do the dead owe the living?

My life too has ended
many times over. Now I’m
doing all I can to return

even the long-gone
once knew tenderness.

“We were idyllic in our isolation.”

“In the East, it is the cow that animalizes the man. Hence, the native occupies this intermediate space between man and beast, which we term ‘savage.’”

it’s happening / again. everything / outside me / get to switching  / channels. brown black / carbon black / black cat black

shouting / the same words but in different languages

there is nothing but performance; the language that stretches to capture us all

I begin to feel my body rise / and I can believe / in what freedom must feel like.

To not have had the luxury to think “the world is over,” but to feel it instead.

My grandmother tells me she loved you fiercely
in the way she reaches for me when your name
is spoken.

Thelonious Monk lost (and found) in Paris.

The stones are endlessly weeping in the dark. Or is it
the bird-chatter of rain. O darling, are you writing
another poem about trees? No, not trees but ghosts
that live on trees and their legend of never-let-gos.

The world never really ended. An apocalypse wasn’t an end so much as a change of state, ice into water.

What does it mean for those living in the diaspora to remain attached to the land they left behind?

“I will be a tightrope walker,” she said, “and I will walk across the air to you.”

“Most were drills. Pilots weren’t to know which were the real deal. They were not to think of the lethal effects of their duty.” A pilot is pulled aside by a desperate woman seeking help.

This is my version of the story, but I will illuminate only a corner of it, one that ran parallel to and underneath it, revealing what was left in its wake.

“Abroadness became my obsession.” When a young Nigerian girl is invited to go live with her uncle in Canada, it sets in motion a peculiar friendship with someone she has long envied.

“You can’t go to Mass like that.” A woman’s mother wakes up dramatically transformed, leading to a reappraisal of their relationships.

When you were / in the Everglades we canoed from Flamingo and through the canals.

My feet moved down another street / and I saw the shape they would draw / on the map in my mind.

Look at my heartbeat / and its consequence, / that cup warm on my palm

In her scholarship, mentoring, and activism, Farah Jasmine Griffin brings a praxis of radical love to an unequal academy.

How would I know / when I’m empty and quiet like breath?

Reflecting on three monumental works of modernism a hundred years on.

But I do miss the hymns, / the small, hard apples with their dimpled skin. I do miss / things.

As a student, I stitched / a cadaver together / while my professor / said you must / be a predator . . .

“She stuffed spinach in her mouth until her teeth were a hayish green.” A woman’s extreme diet earns praise from church friends but concern from her family.

László Krasznahorkai’s latest novel reflects on the power of the surveillance state through the perspective of a librarian who wishes to lock up all books.

Congratulations to Parashar Kulkarni!

Congratulations to Njoku Nonso!

I ain’t dead and in this form, / I can matrix my way out of your bullet.

“When I flick the light on, my ceiling hangs open, a wide mouth.” After her bedroom springs a leak, an English professor tries to help a struggling student.

From street demonstrations to song, dance, film, and poetry, women are advancing a long legacy of struggle against authoritarianism in Iran.

The celebrated novelist treated the past seriously, depicting its psychological complexity and drawing out its present-day political implications.