On Contemporary Art isn’t a critique of its subject but a discussion of its situation. Today, the idea of demarcating artistic movements has faded; after a century of artists, academics and critics culturally categorizing every new wave (die Brücke, de Stijl, Postimpressionism, Neo-Expressionism, and so on), Aira declares “the carnival of names [has] been shut down” and replaced by an empty, auction house-approved label.
Morales is able to string these eclectic stories together into a larger narrative, making the collection surprisingly cohesive and more like a book-length memoir than an essay collection.
The poems and prose in Appendices Pulled from a Study on Light thus delve into Babbitt’s passion for illuminated manuscripts, his confessed object of reverence.
Then, on October 8, a bubble cone began to rise from the earth at one corner of the village. Cracks appeared in fields. The resident administrator to the United Kingdom watched as a cluster of grazing sheep fell into the earth, and, a minute later, the earth seamed itself together, eating the sheep. This, he believed, was the start of a new volcano. He radioed the Royal Navy for help, and a ship set off from Cape Town to help evacuate the islanders. That night, residents camped in tents, as far from the volcanic activity as they could go on the small island. The air was wet with drizzle.
Even within the Indigenous community, identity is a contentious topic, with reasons rooted in a history of attempted erasure. And yet, Indigenous literature is in itself a political act of resistance to those efforts.
The scale by which Sexton extends the territory she covers as a poet, practicing her art while always having a firm eye upon appealing to as massive an audience as possible, call to mind the pop-synthesis self-marketing of later musical figures such as Madonna and Lady Gaga (Sexton herself also had her own band, Her Kind).
This is a book that wrestles with the expansive ideas of life and death as much as it chronicles the multitude of quotidian details we regularly encounter.
Rants from the Hill, Michael P. Branch’s collection of humorous, sly essays is easy to underestimate.
Photo by theilr Tonight, with the rain, the streetlight has turned my bedroom window bright orange, translucent—that kind of toxic phosphorescence found in creeks near strip mines—and of course it makes me think of Kenova, westernmost West Virginia, the bright orange banks of the Big Sandy and the Ohio, lit up with Ashland Oil and […]
I am keenly aware that I look suspicious—a woman wearing a Tyvek moonsuit and waders, juggling a stack of steel posts, fuchsia survey tape, and a rubber mallet. Pickup truck drivers give me you’re-not-from-around-here looks; so do occasional leisure boaters, who I hope to Jesus are not eating any fish from this river. The Bainbrydge River is sluggish, a sulfury, over-hard-boiled-egg green. My steel gauges suck right down into its bottom.