Out With the Old and in With the Ancient: The Bible as Literature in Translation
It isn’t only Israeli politics and government agenda that hang on the narratives of the Bible—the Hebrew language is profoundly steeped in biblical passages, references, and turns of phrase.
George W. Bush and the Literary Double-Take
I'll come clean: I was supposed to write a different post for you, called something like "On the Emotional Incompetence of George W. Bush."
Urban Pastoral: American City Poets and Poems
American poetry has a rich tradition of creating space for the full truth of our cities in poems and drawing connections between the interdependent worlds of American city life. Thinking about this tradition in formal terms, we might call it the urban pastoral.
The Best Short Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “S Is for Silence” by Dacia Price
But that’s the difficulty—for the narrator and for us. We can’t answer the question what we did without also answering who we were.
Objects in Mirror: Emotional Distance in Writing
"You pass through a world so thick with phantoms there is hardly room for anything else" reads a line in Steven Millhauser's short story "Phantoms." The story uses a communal voice and direct statements to the reader to engage us with its ideas.
M. & Mme Bovary the Romantics
I first read Madame Bovary in high school. I found Emma whiny and annoying like I probably was and couldn’t see too far past her image. I didn’t remember her husband Charles at all, and I definitely had no feelings for him. Who would?
Review: GHOST/LANDSCAPE by Kristina Marie Darling & John Gallaher
In the collaborative poetry collection Ghost/Landscape (Blazevox, 2016) by Kristina Marie Darling and John Gallaher there is no beginning or end. The first poem is “Chapter Two.” So begins traversing a time loop of poems where the reader can really “begin” anywhere. What is a beginning and what is
The Best Poem I Read This Month: Joshua Jennifer Espinoza’s “Wrapped In My Body I Dream”
Apogee Journal’s new folio “Queer History, Queer Now” acts as an “altar” to “reject the whitewashing, the profit-making, and political tokenizing that warps queer struggles and tragedies.” For this month, I decided to write regarding Joshua Jennifer Espinoza’s “Wrapped In My Body I Dream.”
Some Call it Dick Lit
Some call it Dick Lit, others call it Lad Lit, but many male authors reject both of these genre categories as being reductionist, inaccurate, and for unfairly lumping disparate novels into a single arbitrary category. How can gender be a genre, they ask.
Poet Activist Spotlight: Jacqui Germain
Jacqui Germain, a poet based in St. Louis, MO, is a Callaloo Fellow, promising political essayist, and remarkably visionary young public intellectual and activist.