Cow Lonely Are You? On the internet of wildflowers a white flower is not what I see blue furling dress petal a flower is part dress part animal part vegetable part face an internet a lighted shape of light on … Continue reading “Four Poems”
When you close your eyes and picture a pig, what do you see? A curly, spring-like tail? A pink belly caked in mud? A curious snout nosing at the dirt or a trough? If I asked you to imagine pigs … Continue reading “On Alex Blanchette’s Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm“
North Bay I can’t be near you today When I’m writing I need A universe of space. It’s real When I see among all The boys’ fluttering asses Peeling into the ocean’s White crashing surge. Three Of them are so … Continue reading “Four Poems”
In her recent book of poetry, I Love It Though (Nightboat Books, 2017), Alli Warren looks at the world skeptically as she explores the nature of desire and the sublime in the present. Warren describes desire for a utopic, alternate … Continue reading ““I did it for the enduring light”: On Alli Warren’s I Love It Though“
In Esopus, a small town in upstate New York, a monument dedicated to Sojourner Truth was erected in 2009 (fig. 1). Truth was born in the area then known as Swartekill, some time in 1797, and lived in bondage in … Continue reading “Saying Her Name: What Monuments to Sojourner Truth Can Teach Us about Memorializing Black Lives”
In an attempt to shed new light on transnational solidarity, Greg Burris’s The Palestinian Idea: Film, Media, and the Radical Imagination (Temple UP, 2020) poses a question: How can we think of Palestinian (and Black) liberation when history repeats itself … Continue reading “Palestinian Liberation and the Limits of the Present: A Review of Greg Burris’s The Palestinian Idea“
In a moment when the voices of the oppressed are ringing out across the world, Julie Beth Napolin’s The Fact of Resonance brings us toward the literary beginnings of modernism so that we can learn to listen for difference, which … Continue reading “On Julie Beth Napolin’s The Fact of Resonance“
Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse observes that “Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle” (72). This, in short, … Continue reading “The Politics of Aesthetics in Anticolonial Thought: A Review of Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance by Sandra Ruiz”
Jazz, declared saxophonist Archie Shepp in 1966, “is anti-war; it is opposed to [the war in] Vietnam; it is for Cuba; it is for the liberation of all people. That is the nature of jazz. That’s not far fetched. Why … Continue reading “On Free Jazz Communism“
Marquis Bey’s Anarcho-Blackness: Notes Toward a Black Anarchism (AK Press, 2020) is (a) concise, necessarily unsettling, Black anarchist work. Here, the propinquity between “Black” and “anarchist” may confuse the reader, as the Black radical tradition and anarchist politics are not … Continue reading “On Marquis Bey’s Anarcho-Blackness“
When director Richard Williams set out to make Who Framed Roger Rabbit? in 1988, no one had really attempted anything like it before. Although, of course, people had. If you’re anything like me, for example, you remember the several extraneous … Continue reading “Eyelines”
My shoulders stiffen the first time I watch Southern Comfort (2001), the film Kate Davis made documenting the last year of Robert Eads’s life. I am aware of the eyes and bodies in attendance, late 2018. I notice my companions … Continue reading “A Love Story”
The year is 1974, the place is Central Park. The jazz musician and iconoclast Sun Ra appears in the park’s band shell “with a hundred musicians, including six drummers, ten bass players, ten trumpets, ten trombones, and three French horns.” … Continue reading “Utopia in Black”
How can a short, single, stable text account for a set of interpersonal, collective, cinematically ephemeral experiences? In mathematics, a fractal is a geometrical figure in which each part has the same statistical character as the whole. The Black Aesthetic, … Continue reading “On The Black Aesthetic Season III: Black Interiors“
This excerpt is from a short novel, “Dudeboy,” included in The Life & Times of Steve Orth, a collection of fiction and poetry forthcoming in October 2020 from Dogpark Collective. Chapter 1 I’m at my apartment and I’m just chilling … Continue reading “from “Dudeboy””
