The Ghost We Call Meaning: A Review of Vijay Seshadri’s That Was Now, This Is Then
That Was Now, This Is Then Vijay Sheshadri Graywolf, 2020. “We are obsessed with ourselves,” wrote theoretical physicist, Carlo Rovelli in his book, Reality Is Not What It Seems. “We study our history, our psychology, our gods. Much of our knowledge revolves around...
The Social Virtues Series
Recent Posts
A Review of Mark Wunderlich’s GOD OF NOTHINGNESS
The experience of reading Mark Wunderlich’s fourth poetry book, God of Nothingness, mirrors the page-turning necessity and immediacy of a can’t-put-it-down novel: We must learn what happens next.
The Mother Who Says Yes to the Sword
O has-been mother of the free-flowing booze
& handy diet pills,
You cashed me in—a cool sacrifice: to jump-
Start your floundering career,
How Can Black People Go Camping at a Time Like This?
LIKE A BEACHED WHALE, THE REFRIGERATION CONTAINER RESTS ON LOWRY Avenue behind North Memorial Health, a trauma hospital in Robbinsdale, Minnesota. It’s been there since March. Either whitewashed or dulled by time, the hand lettering on its side reads, Frank’s Vegetables.
A Review of Kerrin McCadden’s AMERICAN WAKE
American Wakeby Kerrin McCaddenBlack Sparrow Press, 2021 From its epigraph to its final line, award-winning poet Kerrin McCadden’s exquisite third book, American Wake, is about going places. In its energetic momentum, we encounter who moves on and who and what is left...
Keeping an Eye Out for Cougars
Narrow was what they called my cousin who is now as exquisite as the Kenyan model pouting on the cover of French Vogue, but before we were of age, I was the pretty one, light, with good hair, and regular. In every photo from the seventies she was my shadow. I’d...
There are no more silkworms in the wild
Maybe I am being sensitive but when C is teaching our Sunday morning Black-Lesbians- Only-Group about silkworms, I become anxious. We are curling over ourselves, watching through computer screens: a video of women's hands laying out carpets and carpets of...
Love Below the Stairs
Daryl lifts the top of the velvet jewelry box with his free hand and carefully scans the pieces. “Oh! Gimmie here!”
unit_52
thank you for being a present uplifting presence. main, these doors open the other way, what kind of truck we in? fade to live action footage of a haggard face man sitting on the curb with his shoes and socks off, picking at dead skin between his toes.
Two Poems
My aluminum-free/deodorant is made/of charcoal. Iterative/self-perceptions slam/into one another with/the incongruity of/perched hummingbirds.
A Review of G.C. Waldrep’s THE EARLIEST WITNESSES
Hailed by his contemporaries as a visionary poet, G.C. Waldrep aptly presents an intimate study of the literal, physical, and spiritual act and implications of seeing.