If one remains open during the excavation process, it is possible to dredge up unexpected, sometimes unwelcome, truths and thus reveal how one’s past has been woven out of assumptions, the narratives of others, and a collective story told to cloak uncomfortable realities.
Photo by Best Picko Home In 1993, the British artist Rachel Whiteread was commissioned to create a sculpture similar to an earlier work, Ghost, which had involved casting an empty North London apartment in concrete and presenting its interior, solidified. The new sculpture would incorporate the same process, this time utilizing an entire house, the […]
The softness with which Renkl delivers the atrocities of life makes the joys of life shine that much brighter.
Central to the current crisis is a sense of instability and fragmentation inaugurated by mass mobility.
Photo by romana klee The photographer’s studio is on wheels, hitched to a pickup truck, and parked today beside a Dallas tattoo parlor. At one end of the room, she has placed a wooden stool and three lights on adjustable stands. At the other end is a door to a tiny darkroom where she prepares […]
Take a moment to consider the word “hearth.” Does it make you think of the heart of a home? Does it conjure up some primal memory of community, a fire around which long ago ancestors sat, broke bread together, and shared stories?
We spotted our dessert next to the register: el pan covered in cracked pink icing and shaped like la concha; flat pan made of concentric circles and bent to look like una oreja; oven-dark pan shaped like a pig, los marranitos, the favorites of mi mamá.
This quietly devastating “book of friendship,” as the text is subtitled, both flies and lives in the body as Ruhl and Ritvo talk about soup, the afterlife, chemotherapy, and poems—all within breaths and pages of one another. If you already love Ritvo’s poetry, as I do, this book lends a new degree of intimacy and a greater perspective on the aesthetic metaphysics at work in his poems.
Of course, Albon is not building cities. He is writing poems. The same physics don’t apply. Moreover, he is explicitly critical of poetic preoccupations with worlding, with limitless creative expansionism.
What Arnold’s memoir is really about, however, is family. The running is secondary, an access point into the more complicated, contradictory details of her personal life. For Arnold, running both stifles and releases the grief that consumes her after losing her father, and the uncertainty, love, and regret that thump through her family’s history and the pages of this book.