Literature

Lychakivskiy Cemetery in Lviv, Ukraine / Photo by Jennifer Boyer / Flickr So many words; they are like crippled ghosts!They strike, like bullets, far and close byBut always miss the essence of my life;They come in rows.Through these deceitful words I walk and shamble.There is a fight; I’m on the battlefield,Where all my soldiers are

Flint, my hometown, and Detroit, where I live now, are both underrepresented in literature and disproportionately burdened with the narratives of outsiders. The usual story, the dying city narrative, goes something like this: cars, white flight, deindustrialization, poverty, blight, undrinkable water. This story usually comes with familiar illustrations: ruin porn pictures of abandoned houses picked

The largest collection in English of Romanian poet Ana Blandiana’s work, Five Books (Bloodaxe, 2021) displays her lifelong project of expressing liberty and love. The winner of the European Poet of Freedom Prize (2016) and the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry’s Lifetime Recognition Award (2018), Blandiana shows her oeuvre’s full range of form and

Even before its publication, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, Melissa Febos’ fourth book and her first on craft, has reignited conversations about the impulse to write—and silence—stories of violation and trauma. But Body Work is not a manifesto for literary suffering. It is an articulate call for understanding writing, especially autobiographical writing,

Benjamin Murphy, 100 Years of Progress (2021), oil on canvas, 72 x 48 in. / By permission of the artist but the day arrivedwhen exhaustion broke my faceand i was more than bad,i was dangerous. all said poor thinglike future,like a world shut downfor the good of all. so much disappointment was betrayal. i knew

Is there anything more alluring, more full of curiosity and adventure, than a map? Inside every one waits a wondrous tapestry of beautiful landscapes, familiar and unfamiliar names of cities and streets, and an invitation to explore and imagine. Since childhood, I’ve found it nearly impossible to resist the urge to pore over every map

Devour My Blackness While I Sit Here Hungry I want to commercialize your pain Hear me out: I watched the... presentation? performance? thing? What do you call that there? Is there a name for what you do? Anyhow, it’s good stuff. Really feisty. One could even say..... “powerful.” I’d like to capitalize on your.... “feminism.”

In his debut collection The Gleaming of the Blade, Christian J. Collier resurrects a history that was never truly buried for the Black men whose lives continue to be shaped by its violence: “Trauma builds its monsters from the bones of experience. Blood records & remembers everything it survives.” From persona poems that assume the

At the risk of seeming obnoxiously obsessed with ourselves, writers and readers do tend to love books about writers and readers—especially when those fictional writers and readers behave badly. (It’s no wonder, really, why the Bad Art Friend discourse hit a nerve; so many people were frantic with empathetic outrage or gleeful schadenfreude.)  In my

Qian Julie Wang’s debut memoir Beautiful Country is a compelling and intimate portrait of  an undocumented childhood. Much like Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows In Brooklyn and Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, we are carried into the heart and mind of a child: this time, a young, undocumented girl in 1990s New York City who shows

Since the wildly popular HBO series Insecure wrapped at the end of 2021, I’ve been obsessed with a behind-the-scenes photograph on Instagram. It shows a dazzling trio—Issa, Molly, and Lawrence—standing side by side at Molly’s wedding. Issa is draped in a scarlet pleated dress, Molly wears a strapless wedding gown in the center, and Lawrence

When I got to an age where I could read the same books as my mom, she started passing them along to me after she had finished. One of the books she gave me was Reading Lolita in Tehran by New York Times best-selling author Azar Nafisi, a book that I remember not only for

Fahredin Shehu writes of Gili Haimovich’s Promised Lands (Finishing Line Press, 2020), “This book communicates globally giving more than a single book of poems may offer. There is her origin and cultural/spiritual heritage, her place and everyday life, her travels to distant lands and rich geography, her travels to her inner world and all that

I don’t own a smartphone, and never have. While this life choice has made me a happier, more productive person—I don’t know if I could have written my novel Last Resort with another distraction—it has also made me quite “out of the loop.” Thankfully, like all losers and loners past, I’ve found solace—and some kindred

An Unstoppable Optimist on the Way to Camp Hope Allegra Hyde Share article Chapter one of Eleutheria by Allegra Hyde My name, my full name, is Willa Marks. There’s nothing in the middle. My parents must have had their reasons for the omission, though I’ve always considered it a sign of honesty. A middle name

Para on Lake Baikal in southern Siberia / Photo courtesy of the author Editorial note: “Siberian Romance,” a suite of Para’s poems, accompanies this introductory essay. Born in 1956, Jean-Baptiste Para is a poet, art critic, essayist, translator, editor of numerous books, and editor in chief of the French journal Europe, which was founded in

Sunrise over Lake Baikal / Photo by Arseniy Chekmarev / Flickr My name is Iaromira Forgive me if I speak of sad thingsWhen my footsteps echo in my bones A silence saved me from the wordAnother silence will save the word And the wind shall be my home                                     * I saw the stars swim

Photo by Jennifer Boyer / Flickr Berlin poet, essayist, and playwright Esther Dischereit responds to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the shelling near Babyn Yar, the site of Nazi Germany’s 1941 massacre of 33,000 Ukrainian Jews and thousands of other victims. With Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s 1961 poem about the massacre as a point