Literature
On writing without moral objectives, Florida’s thunderstorms, and jobs both terrible and sublime.
If you can’t stand the first person, / get out of the kitchen. / Similar but escalating sleights of hand: / he wants to eat both the girl and the food in her basket. / She is past specialness, / doubling the likelihood. In such young women, / traumas curl / till Christmas ribbon. The greatest predictor of red / is oxygen.
The writer on the space between poetry and prose, how fighting is like dancing, and the resonant symbolism of the idiophone.
I get a part in a movie. I act every once in a while, small bits in small films whenever I know the producer or the director. This time it’s the director.
The real-time making of an artist.
I planned to write a book about / the color blue. Now I’m suddenly surrounded / by green, green gagging me / pleasurably, green holding onto my hips / from behind, digging into / the cleft, the cleft // that can be made.
An anti-novel about the value of the unseen, unknown, and unwritten.
With Nigella Sativa, we arrive at midnight together, to the intimacy that can come from mass hysteria.
This piece consists entirely of first sentences from 268 short stories published in The New Yorker over the past 20 years, from 1997 to 2017.
Editing a collection of artist Carolee Schneemann’s writings.
A print project glitched by digital media.
The writer on surrendering, working through her avoidance, and using her body as an anchor.
I should say a few things / Before I begin. Hell is easy, / We brought us here / And not for the first time.
The covert operative with a complex psyche.
The writers on their latest collaboration, Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War.
Jimmy, it’s your girl. The one at the desk whom you pay a living wage. This is what could be known as a wake-up call if we were the sort of people who relied upon others to remind us of our tasks.
After The Velvet Underground, a poetic underworld.
The writer on the artistic and emotional merits of reality TV.
Conducting a posthumous interview with science-fiction author Octavia E. Butler.
Overcast cobalt, tile unbolted, pictures / On loan require empty space / Like an expletive. Grisaille pigeons, / Endemic to our swamp of / Commission.
