It’s so fitting that the Trump era has ushered in toilet paper shortages in the US. Should the current coup attempt somehow still succeed, and we find ourselves in an endless loop of rule-by-tweet-from-the-gilded-toilet known as Trumpworld, fear not, my fellow Americans—we Soviet refugees can teach you a lot about how to . . .
Read More
Evanthe held still, her limbs pulled into awkward angles—one elbow cocked out to the side, the other braced against a root serving as tripod, both hands grippin the binocular’s rubber houseing hard enough she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to unbend them again. She didn’t dare readjust. Didn’t dare move her . . .
Read More
Sex and Death Photo: Arthur Mitchell and Diana Adams in Agon (1957) by George Balanchine. Photo by Martha Swope ©The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Several nineteenth-century story ballets that have survived the passage of time have similar scenarios. In Giselle (1841), a nobleman groomed to marry a woman he doesn’t much care . . .
Read MoreRead Part 11 here “These days are misty, insulated, mute” We are at the midpoint of autumn and the midpoint of the poem, far enough into both to realize that the incessant endings signaled by earlier sunsets, falling leaves, the endings of days/seasons/years/relationships, and the poet’s own dithering, are themselves only the . . .
Read More
(Photo: Lines from Roque Dalton’s Poema de Amor on a wall near the offices of Al Otro Lado in Tijuana, México, courtesy of Katherine Silver) Roque Dalton Love Poem Translated from Spanish by Katherine Silver Those men who widened the Panama Canal(and were paid from the silver roll instead of the gold roll)who rebuilt the Pacific . . .
Read More
When Angie answers a knock at our door, this girl, Molly, starts talking a blue streak, each word rendering Angie smaller and more pale until I finally understand what Angie must have from the beginning: this girl is her daughter, a daughter I know nothing about, an entire daughter Angie never once . . .
Read More
Introduction: The Classic and the Offending Classic Cover Image: William Blake, Oberon, Titania, and Puck with Fairies Dancing. (circa 1786). Pencil and watercolor, 1’7” x 2’ 3” [From William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream] Last year, dance historian Mark Franko published an essay in the Massachusetts Review on Jerome Robbins’s Opus Jazz, where he argued that Robbins uses Black aesthetic . . .
Read More
Cherry by Nico Walker (Knopf, 2018) Last year the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the NIH declared that 130 people in the United States die after overdosing on opioids every day. Multiples more overdose and survive, as did the narrator of Cherry, a ferocious and exhilarating, typewritten-from-prison debut novel by Nico Walker. Told in . . .
Read More
(Photo: Kim Novak, from Hitchcock’s Vertigo) Read Part 10 here “Everything wrong has been proved.” Events of world-historical magnitude rage, both across the map and just outside our doors, rage even inside our homes, carried there by howling radios and their offspring. Work continues apace as we prepare, commute, spend the day in . . .
Read More
Rain fell violently through the night. San Ye thought of the gravestones in Dongba, and the flesh and bones beneath, and the clothes and things buried with the bodies. The coffins must be swimming in slimy muck. . . he couldn’t sleep. He tossed and turned until dawn, got up, and looked . . .
Read More