Literature

A Busted Family in a Broken Universe If you enjoy reading Electric Literature, join our mailing list! We’ll send you the best of EL each week, and you’ll be the first to know about upcoming submissions periods and virtual events. The Big Bang In this story the details of before don’t matter—the how or why

Series editor’s note: In Ashaki Jackson’s new poem, the Black woman is at the center of the speaker’s attention, which the poet holds in her own imagining, a radical act in itself—not the act of being able to imagine blackness, but the way one upholds it in defiance of whiteness, an inexhaustible thing. Yet the

If you enjoy reading Electric Literature, join our mailing list! We’ll send you the best of EL each week, and you’ll be the first to know about upcoming submissions periods and virtual events. If I were to list the topics the poems in my new collection Machete dig into, that list would include colonialism, faith,

If you enjoy reading Electric Literature, join our mailing list! We’ll send you the best of EL each week, and you’ll be the first to know about upcoming submissions periods and virtual events. Andrea Abi-Karam’s second poetry collection, Villainy, rises out of their grief in response to the 2016 Ghost Ship warehouse fire, which claimed

If you enjoy reading Electric Literature, join our mailing list! We’ll send you the best of EL each week, and you’ll be the first to know about upcoming submissions periods and virtual events. In the spring of 2003, I was directing a play in a park in Toronto. I was twenty-five. During a rehearsal break,

An Amateur Apache Wrestles with America Gene Kwak Share article If you enjoy reading Electric Literature, join our mailing list! We’ll send you the best of EL each week, and you’ll be the first to know about upcoming submissions periods and virtual events. An excerpt from Go Home, Ricky! by Gene Kwak Listen to those blue

“Instead of a totalizing interpretation,” writes the author, translators should seek a dialogical one. “We have to leave space,” he writes, “for a story, an anecdote, a metaphorical footnote.” We all spend a lot of time at airports. After having some coffee and browsing in shops that used to be duty-free, I always like to

If you enjoy reading Electric Literature, join our mailing list! We’ll send you the best of EL each week, and you’ll be the first to know about upcoming submissions periods and virtual events. Alice Walker opens her epistolary novel The Color Purple with a silencing threat. “You better not never tell nobody but God. It’d

If you enjoy reading Electric Literature, join our mailing list! We’ll send you the best of EL each week, and you’ll be the first to know about upcoming submissions periods and virtual events. Kalani Pickhart’s novel I Will Die in a Foreign Land takes place in Kiev during the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, a

If you enjoy reading Electric Literature, join our mailing list! We’ll send you the best of EL each week, and you’ll be the first to know about upcoming submissions periods and virtual events. Hurricane Ida Journal  Sunday, 11:36 AM All gates in the levee system are closed.  I wanted to leave on Friday. I’d been

If you enjoy reading Electric Literature, join our mailing list! We’ll send you the best of EL each week, and you’ll be the first to know about upcoming submissions periods and virtual events. I’ve probably said it more times than Randy Newman: I love L.A. And to prove it, I pay homage to my city

Illustration © Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History Foundation Fragile Eagle The La Brea Tar Pits’ Page Museumdisplays fossils of extinct & extant species. Eyes, glistening hollows.Blackened claws. Breast bone sunkbetween scrawny haunchesas if you’re squatting by a campfire, though your tailbone’s a combfor a countess, tines shiningwith Ice Age asphalt. And your elbows!Oh,

What She Heard in a Room Without Sound If you enjoy reading Electric Literature, join our mailing list! We’ll send you the best of EL each week, and you’ll be the first to know about upcoming submissions periods and virtual events. Pink Noise In 1951, experimental composer John Cage entered an anechoic chamber at Harvard

If you enjoy reading Electric Literature, join our mailing list! We’ll send you the best of EL each week, and you’ll be the first to know about upcoming submissions periods and virtual events. When the finalists for the 2021 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Awards were announced, Deesha Philyaw was thrilled to learn that she’d been nominated

If you enjoy reading Electric Literature, join our mailing list! We’ll send you the best of EL each week, and you’ll be the first to know about upcoming submissions periods and virtual events. In Cairo Circles, Doma Mahmoud lures the reader on a voyeuristic tour of the Egyptian capital’s wildly differing class spheres. On the

If you enjoy reading Electric Literature, join our mailing list! We’ll send you the best of EL each week, and you’ll be the first to know about upcoming submissions periods and virtual events. I think a lot of us believe in ghosts. In fact, many of us are likely haunted by them. I’m talking about

If you enjoy reading Electric Literature, join our mailing list! We’ll send you the best of EL each week, and you’ll be the first to know about upcoming submissions periods and virtual events. Like the complex Philippine history the book aims to depict, there is no single sentence that can sum up Albert Samaha’s Concepcion,

Home is a Trip You Can’t Ever Take Again K. David Wade Share article If you enjoy reading Electric Literature, join our mailing list! We’ll send you the best of EL each week, and you’ll be the first to know about upcoming submissions periods and virtual events. “These Golden Cities” by K. David Wade On the last