I was in my mid-twenties when I immigrated from Pakistan to the US, landing in Manhattan. Fresh off the boat, as the saying goes, I never expected to be attending a mushaira in New York, yet there I was, in the packed, smoke-filled conference hall at the Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan, giddy with excitement […]
27 Essays I’m Not Writing about Elizabeth Koch
1 In April everyone involved in, or touched by, independent publishing saw a flare go up: Small Press Distribution launched a GoFundMe. SPD is looking for $100,000 to help cover its losses during the covid-19 crisis. To state the obvious, the crisis has profoundly disrupted bookselling nationwide—even and especially by Amazon.com, which has suspended and/or […]
THE MOMENT I SAW THE SEA NOT THE LAND (AFTER ETEL ADNAN)
Daily, I remind myself: the future is not dependent on your inability to describe your undoing. 〇 In the red notebook I carry always: a blank twenty-five-cent postcard of Silver Rock, Cannon Beach, Oregon; a small black-and-white photograph of a cattle crossing taken from behind the dashboard of a car facing the oncoming cattle caravan; […]
“The Sunlight Almost Touched Me”: Tactile Horrors in E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops
He touched me, so I live to know That such a day, permitted so, I groped upon his breast. —Emily Dickinson[1] One of the first texts I had assigned for my 2020 spring environmental literarture course, Climate Emergencies, was E.M. Forster’s shocking visionary tale “The Machine Stops.” The story is set on a future […]
Astroturf
Astroturf eats sun like a late meal. The heat greets my left cheek, right cheek rushes with soiled roadway breeze, I reconcile two or more feelings. The astroturf at the Women’s World Cup in 2015 was reportedly 120 degrees at kickoff. Hot surface for the hot […]
What the Butler Saw
John Lahr’s Prick Up Your Ears is a biography of the Northern English playwright Joe Orton that has been sitting at my bedside for years. As one of the most dramatic biographies I’ve ever read, it’s a pleasure to read. As a re-telling of one of the most horrifying true crime stories I’ve ever heard, […]
Defacing the Monument (excerpt)
1. 2. The word “economic” does not appear in the text of the Department of Homeland Security’s webpage entitled “Obtaining Asylum in the United States” is not uttered into the court record. The word “economic” remains in my mouth at the back of the courtroom where I sit scribbling on a legal pad, dangling like […]
Happy Marina
Abramovic Day Parade
Recit: Previously Unpublished Works by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
Lawrence Rinder Most people who know of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha know only her remarkable book, DICTEE, published in 1982 by Tanam Press. This marvelously unique work—which combines poetry, calligraphy and other manuscripts, found texts, diagrams, and photographs— has become a staple of many university literature and postcolonial studies courses. It is one of those […]
Things James Baldwin Could Not Say to Malcolm X on National Television.
1. In America, everyone treated me like a frog-eyed piece of trash and I could not get laid, but in France, in Fra—You see this blowtorch, Malcolm?—I use this blowtorch in Paris to keep the French boys off my dick. I sorta hold it up to this can of hairspray here and make a flamethrower, […]