John Ashbery said he was nice—“nice as a person and nice as an artist.” I think it’s fair to say that we don’t have a rich critical vocabulary for nice artists. (And how ...
Tag: Poetry
“Protest Can Be Beautiful”: Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane
In 2007, the Oxford Junior Dictionary, one of the standard reference works ...
Machines Like Me, But They Love You
In almost any book about artificial life, there comes a moment when the humans, like Victor Frankenstein, are obliged to confront the full reality of what they’ve ...
Translation’s Burden
A book is a strange vessel of expectation. A published book imagines a reader, for a published book without a reader is a book that loses someone’s money. And a book about translation seems to have ...
Summer Reads: Pan-African Literature
To celebrate Africa Day, May 25, Zimbabwean information project Kubatana curated its top-10 titles from Exclusive Books’ Pan-African Writing ...
Oliverio Girondo’s “Superwords”
“Animalevolent.” That’s the word that transfixed me some two decades ago. It’s a portmanteau that I discovered when reading Eliot Weinberger’s translation ...
B-Sides: Chaucer’s “The House of Fame”
For years, and with particular intensity since the 2015 Dylann Roof shooting and 2016 election, we have debated the fate of not only Confederate monuments but ...
Neruda’s Ghosts
Pablo Neruda’s only daughter, Malva Marina, was born in Madrid, in August 1934, and died a little over eight years later, in Nazi-occupied Holland, from the complications of hydrocephaly. She hadn’t ...
“Protest Can Be Beautiful”: Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane
In 2007, the Oxford Junior Dictionary, one of the standard reference works ...
Reading to Children to Save Ourselves
My youngest son’s favorite book, this month, is called Little Blue Truck. If you read as much children’s literature as I do, you are well acquainted with the book’s ...
Virtual Roundtable on “The Mana of Mass Society”
Many of anthropology’s terms of art are taken from afar. Especially in the half century after 1870 ...
Toward the Black Girl Future
To read Eve L. Ewing is to read Chicago. Born and raised in the city’s Logan Square neighborhood in the 1980s and 1990s, Ewing’s love for the city is palpable in ...
Reading to Children to Save Ourselves
My youngest son’s favorite book, this month, is called Little Blue Truck. If you read as much children’s literature as I do, you are well acquainted with the book’s ...
From “Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker”
Reading writers’ letters is the best kind of eavesdropping. It brings the rush and ...
Native Stories from Native Perspectives
“We are from people that have been forced to give up everything and we have this one opportunity to give something to ourselves and we’re going to take it. We are fucking taking it. Even though ...
Kill Your Idols
In April of 1966, Andy Warhol held the first of his now infamous Exploding Plastic Inevitable events at the Polski Dom Narodowy on St. Mark’s Place. A healthy buzz had already developed in the ...
Atlantic Got Your Tongue
Safia Elhillo’s poetry comes to us exactly when we need it, in the era of the travel ban and the border wall. The richness of feeling and formal inventiveness of her work open up an alternative ...
Are You Nobody Too?
Early in 1862, Emily Dickinson began one of her poems with a startling announcement: “I can wade Grief – / Whole Pools of it – / I’m used to that – / But the least push of Joy / Breaks up my feet.” The British filmmaker Terence ...
Poetry in Times of Crisis
Even on a college campus, you rarely spot a poem out in the open. When you do, it’s often a sign that something terrible has happened. In the days after the 2016 presidential election, I came across ...
Breaking the ESL Student’s Imagination
The creation of vivid, readable, and faithful translations of literary works into English calls not only for considerable expertise in the original language, but also for consummate writerly skill in ...
