The Lookout Tree
“Are they gone?” Danny gasps. He is still a heap on the platform, motionless except for the heaving of his chest.
“Nope,” I say. “We’re gonna have to wait.”
Black Ecstatic Ode
Praise to the father holding his sleeping daughter on the 52nd
Street trolley
To the daughter sleeping through the pothole thrum
Praise to the diabetic with shorn feet and sugarcane blood
To the shooting nerve through the left hip and lower spine
To those flying gods on their routes
Praise to the red-headed Rasta and his ganja-laced T-shirt
To the Vietnam vet at Cass Corridor holding his sign
To the sign which reads: “I’m not homeless, I’m just Black”
Praise to the barbers trying to calm the fatherless boys in their chairs
To the mothers trying not to overhear this soothing
To soothing
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Creating New Worlds with Language: An Interview with Emma Raddatz of Archipelago Books
In this latest installment of our Small Press Series for MQR Online, Archipelago’s editorial and development associate Emma Raddatz shares the ins and outs of working at a small press, why translations are so necessary in the American literary landscape, and recommends upcoming titles from the Archipelago catalogue.
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Team Wristband
I believe the climate in America has changed and we are moving towards a best and worst of times situation. Those who revere naked power, and who want a “strong” man over democracy, are feeling emboldened. So too are the mediocre, the bullies and the bigots. Those of us who believe in democracy must fight back daily and art is one weapon among many—though art is a million things besides a weapon.
Alloy
“Love/it was exactly like this/when, for the first time,/we stepped toward each other/like two people folding a bedsheet”
Into the Radical Poetic Future: A Review of Roberto Tejada’s Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness
To depart so much from poetic convention is an act of rebellion. What is Still Nowhere an Empty Vastness rebelling against? And what better future is it signaling towards?
To Silvestre Revueltas of Mexico, In His Death
Your heart like a cathedral/covers us in this instant, like the/ sky/and your song, loud and magnificent, and your volcanic/ tenderness, /fills to the roof like a burning statue.
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“An Anatomy of Loneliness:” A Review of Emmanuel Bove’s My Friends
“I should be so considerate of anyone who showed me friendship,” he says early in the novel. “All their wishes should be mine. I should follow them everywhere, like a dog.” Then he adds, with less than dog-like humility: “I am endlessly kind. But the people I have known have never appreciated this fact.”
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Debut
I waited for Nathan to pass his gaze over me and smile, fumbling for a compliment and finding none. Instead, he put a hand over his heart and dropped his jaw. “And look at you! My god, Andy—isn’t she the spitting image of Björk?”
Documents and Trees: A Review of C. D. Wright’s Casting Deep Shade: An Amble Inscribed to Beech Trees & Co.
Perhaps it was that sense of loss that sent her out searching for different kinds of beech trees, that sent her rooting around in the old books collecting lore and the attempts at early science, that forced her to learn everything she could about these trees.