Literature in Translation |
from Motherfield
“Every year the motherfield is a bride / under a thin muslin of snow, / under the strict supervision of tradition, / it is smoothed with rakes, / combed with ploughs, / inseminated.”
Commentary |
on Come Back in September, a memoir by Darryl Pinckney
“Pinckney’s growth is a function of his understanding the limitations of the circle that’s invited him in — its intellectual distance from the crises they write about, its interpersonal dramas, its whiteness.”
Poetry |
from the “Monpeyroux Sonnets”
“A rainy Monday, everything is shut. / It could be late October; it’s mid-May. / Lights on at noon, outside, rain drums on gray / paving stones, drainpipes, voices.”
Commentary |
on Midwest Materials, photographs by Julie Blackmon
“She has a trained eye for children’s rambunctiousness, the way they eagerly claim and rework adult spaces, and the fear they can strike in mom and dad’s hearts … All of which gives her best photos a frisson of uncertainty.”
Fiction |
“Otra Noche En Miami”
“Santi and I came here — I mean Miami, not Mango’s — to be queer as fuck. Queer as possible before being shipped back to Honduras, closeted and impossible.”
Commentary |
on Back to the Drawing Board: Ed Ruscha, Art, and Design in the 1960s by Jennifer Quick
“A sharp reminder that Ruscha’s art began with the know-how and materials of pre-digital advertising, signage, and package design. These disciplines ‘presented Ruscha with a richly layered landscape of forms, images, and methods, as well as a way of thinking and seeing and being in the world'” …
Commentary |
on The Hurting Kind, poems by Ada Limón
“She remembers earlier places, interests, and attachments as existing in a time when she had ‘so much future ahead of me it was like my own ocean.’ Now she assumes that a phone ringing at night is bad news.”
Commentary |
on Flight and Metamorphosis, poems by Nelly Sachs, translated from the German by Joshua Weiner
“She trafficks in sturdy archetypal tropes and symbols—but this nomenclature never seems static or hackneyed; everything’s repurposed, continually made incantatory and strange.”
Text and Image |
from Asia Calling: A Photographer’s Notebook, 1980-1997
“I went with no agenda and no ‘assignments.’ I went to see what was going on and what things felt and looked like.”
Essay |
“The Novella: Some Thoughts About the Uncanny Genre”
“When we’ve finished reading a novella, we may be left a bit bereft, even bewildered. Yet if the novella were any longer, the plot might lose the ambiguity, the stroke of irrationality, the heightened state of tension that novellas make possible.”
Text and Image |
from Uniform
“Uniform started as an idea to catalog the different school uniforms of Nevis. It soon evolved through my desire to recognize individuality.”
Commentary |
on South To America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, nonfiction by Imani Perry
“If our understanding of the region is to change, Perry argues, we will have to take two contradictory tacks. First is to recognize the diversity of the region. But alongside that, she wants us to recognize the South’s ‘changing same’ …”
Essay |
from The Murders of Moisés Ville: The Rise and Fall of the Jerusalem of South America
“In its issue from December 9, 1894, the newspaper Ha-Tzfira noted that the collection of books being brought by Reuben Sinay had increased to 120 pudi. The ‘pood’ is a Russian unit of mass, and converting this gives us an incredible figure of two metric tons.”
Poetry |
from Leaving: A Poem from the Time of the Virus
“… nobody // themselves anymore, not a single apparition, / withdrawal after defeat // but no destination.”
Commentary |
on The Anomaly, a novel by Hervé Le Tellier, translated from the French by Adriana Hunter
“Le Tellier’s playful writing, as well as his takes on existence, second chances, and personal identity, push his ambitious narrative into realms rarely encountered in popular culture.”