Ward’s Jamaican roots and home in Harlem have been recurring themes in his numerous installations. He speaks with Jaffe about three key works.

O’Rourke and Sanders go over the complex layerings—from lyrics to mixes to the LP’s cover—in O’Rourke’s recent pop album, Simple Songs.

Diao’s first comprehensive retrospective, at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art—fittingly, in the painter’s native China—is the occasion for a conversation that looks back at fifty years of artistic production.

“I’m thinking about how we experience, or try to experience, infinite space and time through the most finite, basic methods.”

Foster and Keene discuss the strategies for black resistance in their respective new books—the poetry volume A Swarm of Bees in High Court and Counternarratives, a collection of short fictions.

Notley’s body of work consists of over thirty-five collections of poetry and prose. To consider her oeuvre, in her interlocutor’s words, is to court “cerebral and sensory overload.”

New York sees two of the playwright’s most recent works performed this fall, The Flick and John. She talks with Kan about her fondness for Chekhov’s plays, writing for certain actors, and the music of speech.

Mold-making and photography have an ambiguous relationship to whatever they reproduce. They can deliver the most faithful rendition of a given model, but it is precisely this similarity that makes them extraordinary, unreal.

It starts, of course, with water. A bath for the newborn, a baptism for the blank canvas.

Of the various collected objects in Cameron Rowland’s studio—a fluorescent orange work coat, a bundle of street-sweeper bristles, several pot-medal badges—the most abundant are books. 

They said I wasn’t smooth enough / to beat their sharp machine.

Where he grew up there were no museums, or art collections, or the possibility of being exposed to any form of art that was not reproduction. 

Blue window where we waited for you.

Winner of BOMB’s 2015 Fiction Contest, selected by Sheila Heti

Dear J.

I’ve been meaning to write to you for some time, though I am sure you are surprised to hear from me. 

Maybe it started as a joke the apparitions, the decorative / locusts no beast could resist you had to laugh

Drawn by the stone called / “Graphite” across white paper / By your/my hand, it is a pretty word, / And looks like and sounds like “visité.”

Huyghe is forever fond of systems that try to take care of themselves—regardless of whether they self-generate, naturally decay, or both.

“I can’t distill it all,” Evie Shockley confesses in her contribution to this vital and multifarious print offshoot of Claudia Rankine’s online Open Letter Project.

Winnie is buried to her neck in scorched earth. A black revolver rests beside her chirping and disembodied head. Willie, her companion, feebly scratches on all fours at the impossible mound that separates them—at one point nearly rolling down its face into an empty abyss below. “Oh,” cries Winnie, “this is a happy day!”

We gathered around you while you told ghost stories. It was a familiar, reflexive, ancient act to draw close to the beat and the voice. When the drummer tripped out a beat, your speech became a song.

One of the joys of reading Zone is discovering the utter range of Padgett’s stylings as both translator and poet.

I was hearing about the return of this legendary serial epic for a few weeks before it happened. 

Originally published in 1974 and the only novel written by Fran Ross before her untimely death in 1985, Oreo walks the line between so many different worlds (highbrow/lowbrow culture, literary/genre fiction, black/white racial dynamics, and feminist/womanist gender politics), that it can only be described as postmodern.