Arts in Society

The revelation of Asghar Farhadi’s films.

 “There is no plot; it’s just Black people living their lives with other Black people on their own planet.”

My dead mother called me to say she knew she killed me a long time ago but look how well I’m doing now.

Death was all around him. Maybe you know what this is like, hearing music overlaid with rain. They stop competing after a while.

So many simply leaving.

Don’t stuff your fingers
in your ears or count the Pentecost.
Don’t ask if that grammar has a rosary
or recipe written in cornrows on her head.

Before I left him /
on his deathbed, my father used to say 
the ice is breathing: this quivering song 
of things once-broken, mending. /
This song of them breaking again.

You can say my mother didn’t know jack
           about no line breaks, but she’ll tell you
that one thing leads to another; and violence
           and love can happen all at once.

In the parallel world in which gesture is followed /
by recompense

I wanted time / to come to me

Teachers told him it was unlikely a child could slip or tumble from that great a height without pushing or prompting. Impossible, they meant to say.

“If ideas are discarded when no longer modish, could we not do the same with unfashionable words?”

How it rose, fell, and may rise again.

I once wrote letters to a prisoner at Guantánamo. The letters always came back / opened.

Pitchfork is dead, but good reviewing doesn’t have to die with it.

The first capturing your gaze into nowhere
the other when you covered your face with your hands
so you were not anonymous, only unseen

On the Nobel Prize–winning writer’s posthumously published novel, Until August.

a sunset makes a sound doesn't it
I learned    too late

Bertrand Tavernier’s daring documentary about the Algerian revolution sought to break the silence in France.

On Lakdhas Wikkramasinha’s vanished histories.

An interview with poet Fady Joudah about writing his latest collection, [...], amid war in Gaza.

From time to time, language dies. / It is dying now. / Who is alive to speak it?

Who did this to you?

in 1989 you walk the main road to /
Tiananmen when the inexplicable /
hits