Violence
“Each time they told me to smile I felt at risk for oblivion, as if it wasn’t me that they were looking at but, rather, some bright reflection of themselves, some aspiration gnarled against their own self-perception.”
“Each time they told me to smile I felt at risk for oblivion, as if it wasn’t me that they were looking at but, rather, some bright reflection of themselves, some aspiration gnarled against their own self-perception.”
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.
A novel about queer rage, the 1990s club scene, and the intricacies of healing.
The writer on surviving assault, deepening our standards for justice, and resisting forgiveness as the only way to move through pain.
Painting the fragmented body.
Building empathy through simulated pickup artistry.
The professor reads the submissions with his hand cradling his sparrow and when he reaches hers, he masturbates profusely, rubbing his sparrow’s feathers until it is nearly bald.
Vast plates shifted littler ones / with constant sounds and heat terrible / Then there was a cleft and so a river
I tried Al on like a suit and he didn’t fit. In the crotch area, excess fabric hung loose, like disappointment.
Writing with the body as her touchstone, the novelist channels a woman warrior in The Book of Joan.
On the day of POTUS 45’s inauguration, alt-right front man Richard Spencer was punched in the face during an interview for Australian television.
”Orlando is a queer AND racial issue AFTER a gun control, Islamophobia, and mental health issue.”
“We need a new word, because neither ‘hate’ nor ‘terror’ will suffice.”
“Queerness is a political force powered by anger.”
Josef Kaplan’s latest book, Poem Without Suffering, is a long poem that begins in medias res then follows, in forensic detail, the trajectory of a bullet through the bodies of two children.
On Iván Repila’s The Boy Who Stole Attila’s Horse
“People struggling to control language, control conversation, literally to control the world.”
The French writer speaks to his translator about his latest autobiographical novel to appear in English. Titled In the Deep, it deals with the link between desire and his early literary output, as well as the effect of his Catholic upbringing and World War II on his imagination.
