LA-based writer Wendy C. Ortiz writes about her loss of innocence in her debut memoir Excavation, which has received rave reviews since its 2014 release. Ortiz’s writing is rife with figurative language like simile, metaphor, personification, parallel structure, alliteration, and repetition, but it is also incredibly self-reflective. Whether it’s the temporal distance that gives her […]
On September 26, 2009, at about a quarter past one in the morning, while outside, a cloudy night sky was closing in on Padua, he, lying on his king-sized futon next to his profoundly asleep wife, was shaken by a violent cough. Eyes staring into the dark bedroom, he was overcome by the age-old fear […]
The Ecstatic is Victor Lavalle’s intriguing debut novel cataloguing two months in the life of Anthony James, a 23-year-old horror-movie loving, obese, unstable, socially inept, obsessed with cleaning, sometimes-schizophrenic, college dropout. Anthony’s narrative begins on September 25, 1995, when he is abruptly rescued from “living wild in his apartment” (3) in Central New York and hauled […]
Rebecca Solnit gets the title for her work The Faraway Nearby from Georgia O’Keefe. “From the faraway nearby” was how O’Keefe would sign letters to the people she loved after moving from New York City to rural New Mexico. Says Solnit, “It was a way to measure physical and psychic geography together” (108). It is […]
I started firewalking after seeing a picture of a monk burn himself to death, but of course it’s more complicated than that. The monk came to history class where we were studying Vietnam, talking about what a mistake it had been, and about the protests against the war, in our country, and over there, where they […]
Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World is a historical fiction novel set between the 1750s and 1810s, encompassing the time frame of the Haitian revolution. Carpentier creates an alternative history to the popular narrative of Toussaint L’Ouverture. The story is narrated by Ti Noël, an uneducated slave of the French plantation owner, M. Lenormand […]
Designed to be murdered by your dog or cat, pet toys appear as dead bodies in these crime scene photographs. Morbidity & Mortality responds to the current popular fascination with cinematic murder and forensics. Contemporary films and CSI-style television programs reveal an obsession with corpses—specifically, artfully composed images of the deceased […]
In the bestselling medical ethics-centered nonfiction work The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, author Rebecca Skloot uses primary resources, including one thousand-plus hours of personal interviews, to piece together a life—Henrietta Lacks’s—lost too soon to cervical cancer yet forever immortalized, thanks to the science of cell culture. Like a wedding cake, the book is rich […]
o there is Michelangelo up the ladder
on the platform
laid on his back
wishing he chipped at a piece of sculpture instead…
Ammi and Abu, and that brother of mine— / They don’t know who I am. Curfews & calls / to prayer, weekly lectures at the mosque, / but then, there’s also the smell of bacon…
In Charlotte, where winter brings no guarantee of snow, small children press their palms together, close their eyes so tight they see waves of color, and plead with God to unzip heaven…
“Coming from an ethnic background and living in a diverse city like Los Angeles, my work reflects my identity as an Asian American…”
Single life is-tequila with lime, / shots of travelers, jacks, diamonds, and then spades, / holding back aces- / mocking jokers / paraplegic aged tumblers of the night trip.…
I want to die the way my dog sleeps / a tiny, take-up-no-room-curl. / I want to live like him, too, / rising twice or thrice a day, / a lift up from a stomach, / a grin to an n, / a head-to-tail unfurl…
When cities are burning / and children sleep in your bed / you can’t measure suffering / like sugar, one tablespoon / at a time…
I lost my virginity while the dragon fell. When the enormous canvas beast faltered, people flocked beneath it. Maybe they hoped their attention would encourage it to stay aloft in the dead air, like zealots of a dying god refusing to believe its power could ever wane….
“I trespass in abandoned houses. I spy on the people who once lived inside, watching them through the telescope of time…”
The following three found poems are from the collection Roger That […]
In the downpour / a pair of cobras slithers / into the resort / and the restaurant empties / of foreigners. / The boy sets his tray of drinks / on a table and runs for the itak / he isn’t supposed to keep / in his locker, but does…
I haven’t been to the place where my father isn’t buried, only ashes and the idea of him. I haven’t said my goodbyes over the patch of grass where his body doesn’t lay….
Hindu Santa stashes / boxes of Just for Men / under the bathroom / sink, bare scalp painted / black with faded tooth / brush bristles. Barbasol…
I construct intimate artworks that investigate the gross romance between person and location…
We wandered your city / for five days, hemmed within / those same cobbled creases, / tucked between brownstones- / mordant lines grown soft / in the damp October night…
Here’s the peach bathroom / that gave her new ways / to look taller—
There are two worlds those with the privilege of portable technology inhabit…
Our eyes tripped over a four-by-four inch bronze memorial embedded in a sidewalk in Cologne, Germany…
Today you follow the holes / birds clawed into the sky…
There was a pecan tree that dropped nuts across the crabgrass that surrounded her parents’ bungalow-style home. She introduced me to her rat-dog and its seven grown puppies that surrounded me, yapping away my patience, each of them dirty and unclaimed…
Lena. Just Lena. My mother didn’t have a middle name, which I thought smacked of parsimony—shortchanged at birth…
In my next life I will come back as a Wild Mountain Woman…
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