Self-Storage

Self-Storage Photo By Joel Swick   [The Bowl that Fills] I can’t conjure my own first memory, but I do remember Virginia Woolf’s. She was in the nursery at St. Ives in the Hebrides. The acorn on the end of the string from a window blind slid back and forth across the floor with the […]

Possums Run Amok

In Possums Run Amok, teenager Lora Lafayette hitchhikes to destinations unknown, striving to quench her thirst to explore the unknown. Eventually she and her friend Kay journey across the ocean from their hometown of Portland, Oregon to experience European cultures whilst embracing an edgy, punk-rock, anarchist lifestyle during the late 1970s. In this “true tale […]

Poet Warrior: A Memoir

A Latin phrase is included in the Great Seal of the United States: “E pluribus unum,” meaning, “Out of many, one.” This is etched into the fabric of the American story. In Poet Warrior: A Memoir, Native Nations’ first United States Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo, indeed makes out of many, one. In her second memoir, […]

Tastes Like War

Here’s the problem with mental illness: what we know about it is far surpassed by what we don’t. This, of course, should be unsurprising. After all, the human brain remains one of the most complex things in the known universe. We’ve figured out black holes, developed vaccines for novel coronaviruses in unprecedented record time, and […]

Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture

In Blackspace, Anaïs Duplan explores the nature of sociocultural liberation through prose, interview, and poetic settings. This meditation roams from a singular to a collective experience. His writing is underpinned with the question of how to achieve Black liberation not only through political movement, but through artistic endeavors: music, film, theater, poetry. This book reckons […]

Incryptions

As Ronald Johnson offers us in his germinal epic, ARK: Beneath a maze pattern on a wall of the church of St. Savino, in Piacenza, the inscription reads: THIS LABYRINTH REVEALS THE STRUCTURE OF THE WORLD. Convoluted of sun and dust, shut dark in a skull, the labyrinth is its own clue. Our lot is […]

Elevation

Photograph by Edwin Chen When and why did I first start doing all in my power to avoid being inside an elevator? Maybe things felt overcrowded in the womb, with my twin in there too, or I got into a tight spot as a toddler and people took a while to notice. In my grander […]

A Ghost in the Throat

Diane Johnson opens her breakthrough biography, The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives, with a challenge to the reader as to why we don’t know about her subject: Many People have described the Famous Writer presiding at his dinner table . . . everybody remembers his remarks. . . . […]