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Qandeel Baloch and the Importance of Loud Women

July 18, 2016 - By Amal Zaman

        Qandeel called out to me some months ago from her bedroom - through the screen of my phone, playfully offering herself to a cricketer in an uploaded video, pouting heavily without any pretense or attempt at veiling the display of her sexuality. We were all instantly captivated, compelled to sway to this woman’s song. In a society where even the mention of human sexuality is hushed out of conversation she was undeniably present. She was unapologetic, unafraid, and so very loud.

        Growing up as a woman in Pakistan teaches you erasure. How best to silently slip into the...

10 Questions for Pete Duval

July 18, 2016 - By Danielle Brown and Amal Zaman

"The alarming nonchalance of her gesticulation is fascinating. She’s in control, but more than this. She radiates. In her Jordache jeans and home-sewn camiseta, the white earbud wires of an MP3 player draped over her shoulder, she seems outside time looking in. This is serenity. The more he looked, the more radiant she became. He found it difficult to put a label to what he felt—other than shame, because he wondered whether such thinking might be the ghost of colonialism talking shit in his head." —from Strange Mercies, our May 2016 Working Title....

10 Questions for Laura Cesarco Eglin

July 15, 2016 - By Danielle Brown and Amal Zaman

"Sharp
hurting like stakes
or licking so sweet

How will you take me?"
—from Da morte. Odes mínimas which appears in the Summer 2016 issue (Volume 57, Issue 2).

Tell us about one of the first pieces you’ve written.

I started out by journaling, and then the entries turned into prose poems, even though I didn't really realize at the time. When I was a teenager I started to write poems in verse.

What writer(s) or work(s) have influenced the way you write now?

My first influences were the Uruguayan Idea Vilariño, the Argentinean Alejandra Pizarnik, and the...

10 Questions for Frances Park

July 11, 2016 - By Amal Zaman and Danielle Brown

“Even thirty-five years ago we cut the silhouette of widow mom and daughter. No one had to ask where the husband/father was; you knew that figure was formative but gone and not by desertion but by death, that we were alone everywhere we went and carried his loss on our back. It’s been this way for so long I can’t recall it being any other way; too long in one sense, not nearly long enough in another. I’m not her only child and we all have our roles, but I’m the one who took her arm when she lost her husband.” — from “You Two Are So Beautiful Together” which appears in our Summer 2016 issue (Volume 57, Issue 2...

10 Questions for Gary Amdahl

July 11, 2016 - By Amal Zaman and Danielle Brown

"Clement mothers, Sweet Fathers: the Neanderthals laid their dead in graves and covered them with flowers. This is certain, in all the ways that we can approve certainty. It is also possible to think that they sang, wordlessly, and danced, strangely, while they wept. They were, it continues to be possible to think, big sentimental artistic oafs, without the vocal apparatus,...