Critical Essays Archive
The Discomfort and Difficulty of Attention
To pay attention has an actual cost. It requires us to trace the brittle edges of our connections to other people. To witness their pain and have them witness ours; to wait and gather ourselves together to hear what’s coming next.
The Shape of Nations
One cannot simply outgrow or outlive a colonial, racist history. In order for the system to change, we need to stare at it and acknowledge it for what it is.
Translating Genderqueerness
Genderqueerness is futuristic at its core, which is why you’ll come across many genderqueer characters in speculative fiction. But translation creates friction: gender identities meant to be ambiguous or kept secret until the reveal of an unexpected twist come up against other linguistic systems, as well as translators’ preconceptions.
Attention in Every Day We Get More Illegal
Juan Felipe Herrera’s 2020 poetry collection suggests that to sustain the kind of attention that leads to embodied care, to structural justice and community support, we will need both rage and dancing, ranting indictments and ancestral wisdom. Outrage and tenderness are not competing forces but mutually sustaining.
Igbo Wisdom in God of Mercy
Okezie Nwọka’s debut novel continues a powerful literary lineage of works representing Igbo resistance to colonial pressures. Nwoka’s book focuses on the tradition itself, treating it not as a fatally flawed or romanticized stable inheritance, but a living system that is not beyond change.
Robots Like a Greek Chorus
Poets are grappling with their anxieties over the future of artificial intelligence; with their awe at technological innovation; with their fumbling through the knowledge that, in pockets and backpacks, one carries with them a computer’s long-term memory—infallible and encyclopedic, unlike ours.
Art that Makes Us See
Cookie Mueller’s work bends the rules of craft. It would be easy to say that she skims above the surface, providing the sort of tales you’d hear after hours in a smoky bar.
Reading Baldwin after Harvey: Why Climate Change is a Social Justice Issue
Of course, the circumstances between Hurricane Harvey and the 1943 Harlem riots are different, but the fault lines exposed by those events are not.
Ander Monson’s Essaying
Monson’s newest collection, out tomorrow, continues his exploration of essays and essaying, scrutinizing the “I”; playing with prose and white space on the page; and examining the nature of memory—all while suffusing his observations with the cultural elements he examines in earlier collections.
The Tragedy of Lady Macbeth
Lady Macbeth’s tragedy is the tragedy of being a woman. What more powerful way to show this than through a difficult woman to like?