In my undergraduate course Criticism: Theory and Practice, at Birzeit University—a course that introduces students to the building blocks of literary form—we read A. E. Housman’s poem “The Grizzly Bear.” The Housman poem reads: The Grizzly Bear is huge and … Continue reading “From the Classroom to Gaza: Belated Narratives and the Shared Struggle for Freedom”
How should an anti-Zionist Jew respond to the genocide in Gaza and its ramifications? This was the subject of my book To See in the Dark: Palestine and Visual Activism Since October 7 (2025). It was published on January 20, … Continue reading “Undefeated Despair”
All day, the talk is lint. Committees meet and look at their calendars. The carpet hardly moves. The lobby doesn’t even smell of corpses. It’s Monday here. There’s a salad bar here. In Rafah, a wall is blown off … Continue reading “The Clock Men”
the colonial question has always been: what to do with all these cypresses? what I forgot to say, dear colleagues, our university is indefensible it is stated that they love us and there is no water and no electricity fuck … Continue reading “our love is terroristic”
Refaat, your death visited me. It stood across from me in the dim room. I told your death “I am ready. I am ready.” Your death stared back, unimpressed. I sat in the wooden chair I arranged in … Continue reading “Rendition”
In the fall of 2023, it is a bit late to be reviewing Stacy Szymaszek’s Famous Hermits, which came out months ago. But that does not matter so much. In fact, there are parts of Famous Hermits that seem already … Continue reading “On Famous Hermits by Stacy Szymaszek”
Andrea Abi-Karam’s most recent book is Villainy, published by Nightboat Books last year. Jasbir K. Puar is a member of the Social Text Collective and the author, most recently, of The Right to Maim (Duke UP, 2017). Here the authors … Continue reading “Andrea Abi-Karam and Jasbir K. Puar: Correspondence 2021”
“I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant … Continue reading “Generation Loss: A Feeling Called Heaven by Joey Yearous-Algozin”
This edition of Periscope focuses on the writing of Kevin Killian, the poet, memoirist, playwright, and fixture of New Narrative writing who passed away last June. The writers here—Steven Zultanski, David Kuhnlein, Kay Gabriel, Eric Sneathen, and Cam Scott—examine a … Continue reading “On the Work of Kevin Killian”
In 2017 Daniel Benjamin and I organized Communal Presence: New Narrative Writing Today, a gathering of writers and scholars to celebrate and complicate the work of a group of writers that has not often been considered by academic criticism. We … Continue reading “Nothing Ever Just Disappears: Remembering Queer Theory’s New Narrative”
This spring, before the world was turned upside down as result of the global health emergency, Audre Lorde’s memory was to be inscribed onto the cityscape of Berlin. A citizens’ initiative had successfully called for the renaming of a street … Continue reading “Poetry as a Way of Living: An Interview with Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro”
Any poetic writing about and through pop culture wants to flush the residues of a Romantic ideology of original virtuosic composition without also thereby disposing of the subject. Kathy Acker describes the insouciant fun of unoriginal writing: “It’s like a … Continue reading “Action Kevin”
It’s something of a relief, when, late in Fascination, Kevin Killian reflects on the cruelty of the youthful romances that he’s been narrating: “…as I look back I see that I had a ruthless streak; I could be horrifyingly manipulative” … Continue reading “Very Good: On Kevin Killian’s Fascination“
The frenzied pace of the news cycle in the age of Trump has a magnetic pull that makes it hard to take a step back and think strategically about the recent history of popular anti-capitalist and anti-racist struggles that have … Continue reading “Against Racial Capitalism, from Occupy to the Present”
The following is an edited interview between writer and publisher Aaron Winslow and two writers whose books he has recently published on Skeleton Man Press, Kristen Gallagher and Ed Steck. You can read an excerpt from Kristen’s 85% True/Minor Ecologies … Continue reading “A Little Gross: A Conversation with Kristen Gallagher and Ed Steck”
