Audre Lorde

Please Come Flying

Please Come Flying

“Please come flying,” Elizabeth Bishop pleads with Marianne Moore, in her poem “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore” (1955), “above the accidents, above the malignant movies, / the taxicabs and injustices at large.” This will—passed between two poets and friends—to alight from the predictable rhythms of crimes made regular, enmediated, and immense is an appealing one.

Juan Villoro’s “The Guilty” Decenters What It Means To Be Mexican
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Juan Villoro’s “The Guilty” Decenters What It Means To Be Mexican

Last month I found myself in the gardening section of a German supermarket where, on sale, I came across Mexican-themed cacti. Tiny, impossibly hairy things with googly eyes and black moustaches and pastel colored sombreros made of clay. Typical German kitsch. “That looks like my uncle Mario,” I thought. That moustache. Those manic eyes like,…

Round-Down: Reading As Luxury, or Necessity?

Round-Down: Reading As Luxury, or Necessity?

  Garbage collector Jose Gutierrez gives new meaning to the phrase “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” The 53-year-old Colombian man has been collecting children’s books out of dumps for the past twenty years in order to provide a makeshift library to the city of Bogota. He now houses over twenty-thousand titles rescued from…