But the idea of transformation has always been something that I romanticize in a work. I’m cautious of it but I also need it to connect my thoughts with the process of making. That’s really important.
—
Nari Ward
- Mona Hatoum by Janine Antoni
- John Sayles by David L. Ulin
- Jim Lewis and Dale Peck
- Maureen Howard by Joanna Scott
- Steve Earle by David Gates
- Martin McDonagh by Fintan O'Toole
- Victor Garber and Alfred Molina by Mark Magill
- Gillian Wearing by Grady T. Turner
Interviews
- Billy Copley by Mimi Thompson
- David Clarkson: Altering States by Saul Ostrow
- Sarah Sze by Judith Hudson
Artists on Artists
- Defiance by Carole Maso
- Four Poems by Daniel Flores y Ascencio
- At the Déjà Vu by David Gilbert
- Quarantine by Jim Crace
- Duration by Ruth Danon
- Pure Hallow Tone by Sidney Wade
- Rosa: an excerpt from Slaughtermatic by Steve Aylett
First Proof
- Pamela Sneed’s Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom Than Slavery by Coco Fusco
- David Gates’s Preston Falls by Jenifer Berman
- The Voice of the Turtle: An Anthology of Cuban Stories by Caryl Phillips
- Luc Sante’s The Factory of Facts by Robert Polito
- Voices from Abroad: Baricco, Brizzi, Brussig, Darrieussecq, Nothamb by Minna Proctor
- Amistad: The Opera by Rone Shavers
- Finn Taylor’s Dream With the Fishes & Matthew Bright’s Freeway by Lynn Geller
- Lex Braes by Roland Legiardi-Laura
- James Sheehan by Thomas Bolt
- Arne Svenson’s Prisoners by Suzan Sherman
- Carrie Yamaoka by Bill Arning
- Elliott Green by David Schulz
- Rose Nolan by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe
- Bob Dylan & Radiohead: Subterranean Homesickness by Vernon Reid
- Rufus Wainwright by Belissa Cohen
- Bonnie Collura by Jenifer Berman
Editor's Choice
*
The blank
moon sheds
it clothes
all over
my lawn
then melts
into the shallow
bath of itself
*
Longing
flushed
with wine
perambulates
the garden
knocks
on my door
loosens
its shoulders
and opens
*
The blue
heart breaks
and pools
on the floor
*
Night lays
my body down
in the heart
of the house
and begins
its bald
ministrations
*
Gold
on my eyes
I lie
on the ribs
of the stone boat
which floats
in full-bodied
silence
toward
the island
of reeds
*
I bear
in mind
the heft
of the tongue
and articulate
the slenderest
of figures—
nostalgia
for the bed
of singing
grasses
*
—Sidney Wade is spending the year in Istanbul. Her second collection of poems, Green, will be published in April in the James Dickey Series of Contemporary Poetry by the University of South Carolina Press.
Related
On the cannibalization of black pain and how we free ourselves from it.
I like when words fail. It shows we don’t believe / we totally know. Name a plant in a forest // and you think you know it. That name / to a bird or a dog, that sound is a squawk.
I cannot feel my cat’s fur / with my left hand. / Of course / I also cannot feel / my children. with my left / hand. Their throats. I cannot / feel my own body, the soft / candle wax of it. I cannot go where / I used to.
Originally published in
BOMB 63,
Spring 1998
Featuring interviews with Gillian Wearing, Mona Hatoum, Jim Lewis, Dale Peck, Maureen Howard, John Sayles, Steve Earle, Martin McDonagh, Victor Garber, and Alfred Molina.
