I’ve heard Atsuro Riley read publicly only once, at AWP in 2016, as part of the lineup of Whiting Award winners. Before that, I had heard him read a single poem, “Sunder,” for a 2011 Poetry podcast. Riley’s voice, its …
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In May and June 2020, Americans gathered en masse to oppose U.S. law enforcement’s routine murders of Black civilians. Armed with their iPhones, protestors abandoned their tv sets and computer screens—in front of which many had been parked for months …
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If the apple is that most iconic of American fruits, what is its counterpart among diasporic cultures from Asia? When I was growing up in Baguio City in the Philippines, one could buy tissue-wrapped “Red Delicious” apples and “Sunkist” oranges …
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Every piece included in Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness, a new anthology edited by Anjanette Delgado, grapples with the concept of “uprootedness,” a term used by Reinaldo Arenas, an influential Cuban novelist and gay …
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God tastes like a walnut. Jesus tastes like fried chicken. Dolly Parton tastes like Sweet’N Low, and matricide—for any correlation or the lack thereof—tastes like peach cobbler. Monique Truong’s second novel, Bitter in the Mouth (2011), is a coming-of-age story …
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Like Yaa Gyasi’s previous novel, Homegoing (2016), and in the spirit of many other works by West African writers, her latest book, Transcendent Kingdom, straddles two worlds. This story about how a young woman resolves the tension between her …
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“I brought you a metaphor,” quips a character named “Fragile,” as she hands Death Stranding’s protagonist, Sam Porter Bridges, a golden mask that resembles a human skull. Fragile is inheritor and chief executive of Fragile Express, a shipping company …
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Virga, a derivation of the Latin word for “branch,” is the name for rain that dries before it touches the ground, appearing as a mass of streaks diffusing underneath a dark cloud. Shin Yu Pai’s newest collection, Virga, …
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