A trace is a small, but non-negligible amount of a thing implying a larger amalgam of it elsewhere. A trace is a presence, however miniscule, that points away from itself […]
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Cheat with the wrong woman, and you may find a bunny boiling in your kitchen. Such is the enduring legacy of 1987’s Fatal Attraction and fount of the shorthand for […]
Read MoreBoth of Alison Rumfitt’s novels open with a content warning. As well as flagging potentially distressing material, these warnings function as upfront statements of Aboutness. “Tell Me I’m Worthless is […]
Read MoreI keep fighting off awareness that my imaginative life has been stuck in a rut for a long time. When one dismisses specific contemporary volumes of poetry, one can blame […]
Read MoreScene 1 A small, stuffy bedroom in a boardinghouse called the Palace, window thrown open to the desert night. Two men have reunited after meeting nearly a decade ago when […]
Read MoreI begin this review of Kazim Ali’s latest book, Sukun: New and Selected Poems, while attempting to process the daily news coming out of Palestine. I am thinking of Ali’s […]
Read MoreIn the first chapter of The Porch: Meditations on the Edge of Nature, Charlie Hailey defines the porch as a place of meeting and exchange: “Porch is that place where […]
Read More“Well, it was a sort of bet,” recalled Tom Phillips, decades later. “I was in a furniture shop with a friend, R. B. Kitaj, another artist, and I said, ‘the […]
Read MoreEarly in the pandemic, those of us raising school-aged children found them suddenly everywhere, all the time, closer than they’d been since infancy. It was as if my oldest child’s […]
Read MoreCarrie Mae Weems’s 1997 photograph series Not Manet’s Type presents a series of nude self-portraits accompanied by text. The fourth image in the sequence shows Weems’s reflection in a round […]
Read MoreOur toys are talking to us. Fulfilling the childhood fantasy of dolls that return affection, speak back, or even come to life, recent films have seized upon the timeless fascination […]
Read MoreElizabeth Arnold’s Wave House reveals a literary intelligence so fiercely independent and yet so central to my sense of contemporary literature that I’m tempted to use the book to stage […]
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