In 1900 the world’s fair was held in Paris. Like world’s fairs before it, the 1900 Paris Exposition celebrated technological innovation within the context of a world built of nations, projecting an air of unbridled optimism through a conviction of …
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I will say it plainly: in America, the ostensible pursuit of objectivity has historically served to silence Black voices. This is true in the field of journalism, in every hall of the justice system, and even in each of the …
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Out of the North the train thundered, and we woke to see the crimson soil of Georgia stretching away bare and monotonous right and left. Here and there lay straggling, unlovely villages, and lean men loafed leisurely at the depots; …
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Addendum
One of the most valuable things I learned studying with Ruth Ellen Kocher was the concept of “Mastery of Form/Deformation of Mastery,” coined by scholar Houston Baker to describe the aesthetics of Black …
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Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-born into the world-wilderness. Let there spring, Gentle One, from its leaves vigor of thought and thoughtful deed to reap the harvest wonderful. (Let the ears …
Read MoreThe first time I saw Salim, the weather report called it one of Karimnagar’s hottest summers. Streets bore silence like a curfew. Cows belched and jutted out their tongues for moisture. The ice cream vendor rolled his cart into the …
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When a bolt of lightning falls in love
with an old woman, sex is reinvented
as the world’s first toaster oven.
When lightning falls in love with a middle-
aged woman, lightning gives
birth to an electric guitar. …
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Poetry
Chronicles on Disappearance; It Is Sad to See a Horse Sleeping; Phantom Limb; & Displaced Distance as a Red Berry
Phantom Limb
after Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Steadfast Tin Soldier”
The truth is, let’s say, that the tin soldier did not fall in love
with the paper-doll ballerina. He fell in love with his missing limb.
Let’s hold …
PREFACE
WhateverWordsworth: Dear Reader is the Poet. The poet is above all a reader. Poetry is nothing more than hysterical citation. A love affair with the bust I’m drawing in college: I’ve made too soft the edges, and my teacher …
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