Horse Poems
Horses are ghosts. They are living reminders of our preindustrial past. Like ghosts, they remind us of uncomfortable things.
Critical Essays
Hilary Mantel’s Tudor Mirror
The final book in Hilary Mantel’s award-winning trilogy completes the suggestion that time is the mirror in which we see ourselves, and that the uncertain reflections we cast change according to the source and quality of the light.
Kimiko Hahn’s Sincere Assemblages
The question of a collection whose various subjects are assembled, rather than logically produced, is less what they have in common; it is instead what they make in common.
The Moral Universe in Ninety-Nine Stories of God
Fiction writer and essayist Joy Williams wears sunglasses all the time—a fact that might be a walking metaphor. In Williams’ world, it seems, God is also wearing a pair of mirrored sunglasses, and after we tire of making funny faces at ourselves in His lenses, we start to panic.
Punch Me Up to the Gods’ Letter to the Past, Present, and Future
Brian Broome’s 2021 memoir is a letter to Black boys and Black men who have been “molded, not with fingers but with punches.”
Gnomes’ Depiction of Tragedy
Sarah Shilo’s 2005 novel explores the repercussions of trauma without support, tragedy without aid.
Life and Death in Morgan Talty’s Night of the Living Rez
The story of the destruction of one world has on its other side the generation of something new. It may not be a world fit for the living, but it is still a world—a new one, at that.
Zong! and the Financialization of the Black Body
M. NourbeSe Philip makes it clear that the material body, personal identity, and non-dominant culture become sites of violence when they are submitted to totalizing modes of financialization. In her 2008 book of poetry, this violence is demonstrated in its most immediate and graphic form: chattel slavery.
Breaking Down “Medieval” Violence
To understand what is “medieval” about particular forms of contemporary violence is not to understand a history of violence. It is, instead, to understand our own modern cruelty and our own deep discomfort with acknowledging it as ours.