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Portals for Memory, and Wonder, in the Work of Reggie Burrows Hodges

April 4, 2021 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

at Karma Gallery, NYC
Reviewed by Hilton Als
NYRB

Reggie Burrows Hodges begins by painting a raw canvas black. Then he paints his figures and their atmosphere on top of that. His hand is everywhere in his work, in control but not controlling. Shall we call Hodges’s work controlled bleeding? While Color Field painters such as Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and the like managed their paint by splashing color here and there, their project was different from Hodges’s in a number of ways, including their use of color. While today we look on those distinguished Color Field paintings for the joy they express about physicality, the irrepressible eye, and a relative lack of fear when it comes to the decorative, there are, in these artists’ wonderfully gestural work, some shortcomings. Such as their use, or lack of use, of the color black, a hue that is of the utmost importance to Hodges, who has said: “I start with a black ground [as a way] of dealing with blackness’s totality. I’m painting an environment in which the figures emerge from negative space….If you see my paintings in person, you’ll look at the depth.” [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Being Apart: A Memoir of 2020

March 30, 2021 By Riot Material 1 Comment

by Mark Goodman

For us the new year began far from home at the southern tip of Africa. Apartheid — “apartness” — was a euphemism for racial brutality, and the necessary condition for its enactment: the dehumanizing ghettoization that precedes violence. 2020 would be a year of reckoning for my country’s racial division and a year when being-apart became a universal condition. The disorienting isolation of quarantine spread with its own kind of virulence, eroding intimacy and fraying bonds. [Read more…]

Filed Under: The Line, Thought

Simphiwe Ndzube’s Like the Snake that Fed the Chameleon

March 8, 2021 By Nancy Kay Turner Leave a Comment

at Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles (through 20 March 2021)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a Cheshire cat.
–Julian Huxley

I will eat the last signs of my weakness
Remove the scars of old childhood wars
and dare to enter the forest whistling
like a snake that had fed the chameleon
–“Solstice,” Audre Lorde

Simphiwe Ndzube’s engaging exhibit, entitled Like the Snake that Fed the Chameleon at Nicodim Gallery, is a visual and aural treat composed of paintings, sculptures and two installations, all bathed in a soundscape created by the artist in collaboration with Thabo K. Makgolo and Zambini Makwetha. A master storyteller, Nzdube creates an existential, otherworldly space where the ordinary becomes extraordinary. The work defies easy explanations, as mystery is piled on top of enigma. Each painting or sculpture shares a homemade, do-it-yourself aesthetic, with all seams made visible, as though haphazardly sewn, stitched, stapled, glued and pinned together in a hurry. All collaged elements are intentionally separate and noticeable, like a homey piecework crazy quilt. Ndzube juggles fact and fiction, the real and the imagined, with a skill and dexterity of a trained magician while employing inventive improvisation like a superb jazz musician. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Radical Black Dignity and the Shared Revolutionary Paths of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

March 7, 2021 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

Reviewed by Brandon M. Terry

The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.
by Peniel E. Joseph
Basic Books, 384 pp., $18.99
NYRB

Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X met only once, at the US Capitol during the Senate debate over the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That chance encounter was immortalized in a photograph that shows the two men shaking hands and smiling but reveals little trace of the public feud that has linked them in our historical imagination. Their conflict has cast arguably the longest shadow over African-American politics and the struggle for racial justice of any contretemps since the one between W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington at the turn of the twentieth century. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, The Line, Video

It Floods the Womb Until One Drowns

February 23, 2021 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

Reviewed Brandon M. Terry

The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X
by Les Payne and Tamara Payne
Liveright, 612 pp., $27.52
NYRB

At the end of his remarkable, improbable life, Malcolm X was on the cusp of a reinvention that might have been even more significant than his conversion in prison from criminal predation to religious piety. Although he rose to prominence preaching the bleak, racialist metaphysics of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam (NOI), which depicted whites as “devils by nature,” in March 1964 Malcolm defected from the Nation and converted to Sunni Islam. Charging Muhammad with the sexual exploitation of his teenage secretaries, and the NOI with corruption, criminality, and idolatry, Malcolm pushed a dangerous feud toward its deadly conclusion. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, The Line

In Conversation: Andrej Dubravsky and Sam Trioli

February 22, 2021 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

Andrej Dubravsky, Aggressive Slav + Friendly Slav, at LAUNCH F18, NYC
by Sam Trioli

Andrej Dubravsky speaks to Sam Trioli about his new paintings for his current dual exhibition at LAUNCH F18, Aggressive Slav and  Friendly Slav. Created from his countryside home in rural Slovakia, Andrej shares the effects on his work and life with returning to nature.

SAM TRIOLI: This exhibition highlights a new series of paintings for you. How did the Aggressive Slav/Friendly Slav series first begin?

ANDREJ DUBRAVSKY: I don’t even know if it’s a particular “series” with an exact start and end, to be honest. I just keep working all year long on various subjects in parallel, no matter if there’s any show coming up next month or in the next six months. Sometime before the works had to be shipped to New York City, I lined up many paintings outside in my garden and I picked from all of these paintings and sort of curated them in a way that would make a sense. This show makes it my first solo show in New York City.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Interview, The Line

For Our Dyings: Shirin Neshat’s Land of Dreams and The Colony

February 7, 2021 By Lisa Zeiger Leave a Comment

by Lisa Zeiger

“All I can see is the frame.”
–Robert Mitchum in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past

The art of Shirin Neshat is the pure, clear pool at the heart of a Persian garden. On its surface play fountains of poetry and music, films and visions. In its depths reside all the sequestered emotion, alluring ritual, and ambivalent traditions of the artist’s native Iran. Long gone from another country, Neshat exalts its beauty in the photographs, video installations and feature films she has been making since the early 1990s. To paraphrase Henry James, she is someone on whom nothing is lost, least of all the lessons and losses of her own life, in particular the chasm of her exile from Iran. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Film, The Line

Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle

January 28, 2021 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC (ended 1 November 2020)
Reviewed by Sanford Schwartz

Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle
an exhibition at the Birmingham Museum of Art,
November 20, 2020–February 7, 2021;
the Seattle Art
 Museum,
February 25–May 23,
 2021;
and the Phillips Collection,
 Washington, D.C.,
June 26–
September 19, 2021.
Catalog of the exhibition edited
by Elizabeth Hutton Turner and Austen Barron Bailly.
Peabody Essex Museum/University of Washington Press,
188 pp., $45.00
NYRB

As we were waiting on line at the Metropolitan Museum to get into the exhibition Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle, I told my friend that one reason why Lawrence, though long an esteemed name in American art, has a rather modest presence in our museums may derive from his not having made oil paintings. In a long career that stretched from the late 1930s, when he was barely in his twenties, through the late 1990s—he died in 2000, at eighty-two—he primarily used gouache (which is sometimes referred to as poster paint) or tempera. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Books, The Line

Lettering The Yet Known: The Arcane Calligraphs of David D. Oquendo

January 25, 2021 By Lisa Zeiger 4 Comments

by Lisa Zeiger

“I dream of a new alphabet.”  — Marcel Broodthaers, 1974

When considering the merit of a work of art, should the biography of its maker matter? Should we train the tentacles of personality upon the armature of art? When I first saw images of David D. Oquendo’s calligraphic paintings on Instagram (@monkpuppy) I had no ideas about the age, identity or ethnicity of their maker. The paintings were all sign rather than signature, solemn instances of regal yet anonymous beauty, not unlike that of many hieroglyphic writings made in ancient Egypt. Such was the imposing presence of these unfamiliar letters that, while I wondered if they conveyed a meaning, I didn’t care. As I would later learn, a friend of Oquendo’s told him, “You have not created a language, but language.” [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Hauntings in the Imagination: New Books on Bluesman Robert Johnson

January 22, 2021 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

by Greil Marcus

Up Jumped the Devil: The Real Life of Robert Johnson
by Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow.
Chicago Review, 326 pp., $20.05

Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson
by Annye C. Anderson, with Preston Lauterbach,
and with a foreword by Elijah Wald.
Hachette, 203 pp., $24.99

Love in Vain: Robert Johnson, 1911–1938
by Mezzo and J.M. Dupont
translated from the French by Ivanka Hahnenberger.
London: Faber and Faber, 56 pp., $24.05
NYRB

There’s an old blues metaphor. You know, Robert Johnson found his sound at the crossroad when he made a deal with the devil. It seems to me that the country is at a crossroad, whether we are going to continue to invest and double down on the ugliness of our racist commitments, or [we’ll] finally leave this behind. —Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

The blues singer and guitarist Robert Johnson was born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, in 1911, grew up in Memphis, and was fatally poisoned by a jealous husband during a performance at a juke joint near Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1938. He recorded twenty-nine of his own songs for the Vocalion label in San Antonio in 1936 and in Dallas in 1937. In 1938, with the blues musician Johnny Shines, he traversed most of the eastern part of the country, playing from St. Louis to Chicago to Detroit to Harlem. Later that year the producer John Hammond, who had celebrated his recordings in New Masses, knew Johnson had to perform at his historic “Spirituals to Swing” concert at Carnegie Hall; learning of his death, Hammond played two of his songs on a phonograph on the stage. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, The Line

Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art

December 25, 2020 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC (through 31 January 2021)
Reviewed by Anna Shapiro
NYRB

The Whitney’s show, Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, is a study in revisionism, recasting the standard story so that those formerly disregarded and excluded from the canon of modern American art are instead given a place in it. Exhibitions in recent years have been doing that rewriting in accord with values newly freed from stigma, discovering or rediscovering artists who are female or non-European-American, or who simply didn’t fit the strictures of formalist Modernism. The artists in this show, however, were truly avant-garde in their social values, championing the underdogs of history when it was deeply unfashionable to do so. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Salman Toor’s How Will I Know and Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art

December 20, 2020 By Arabella Hutter von Arx Leave a Comment

at Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC: Salmon Toor: How Will I Know (through 4 April 2021) and Vida Americana: Mexican Artists Remake American Art, 1925-1945 (through 31 January 2021)
Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx

In two rooms on the ground floor of the Whitney Museum, a scattering of miniature brown men frolic around the walls, choreographed by Pakistani artist Salman Toor. Some dance, some light a cigarette, others whisper. Many do nothing but offer themselves to our gaze or that of their cellphone. Salman Toor, who admits to admiring Watteau and Gainsborough, has adorned his tableaux with a whole festival of baroque imagery: undulant mustaches and hair styles, collars that almost look like lace, a loose neckerchief, a large hat largely out of place. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Photography as Bildungsroman: On Jason Eskenazi’s Wonderland, Black Garden and Departure Lounge

December 18, 2020 By Allyn Gaestel Leave a Comment

by Allyn Gaestel

I lent Jason Eskenazi’s photo books to a friend of mine to look at after dinner. I had been carrying them in my suitcase for eight months. It was the night before a residency where I planned to finally cohere the fragments of this essay into a text. In the morning my friend told me the books were intense to look at right before bed. She quoted the introductory poem to Departure Lounge:

If you cannot bear your grief
And you dare not dare to die
Then make of grief a song
And bear it high.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Books, Image, The Line

Envisioning a Gilded Vengence in Mark Steven Greenfield’s Black Madonna

November 20, 2020 By Lita Barrie Leave a Comment

at William Turner Gallery, Los Angeles (through 28 November)
Reviewed by Lita Barrie

Mark Steven Greenfield’s powerful exhibition of Black Madonna paintings, currently on view at William Turner Gallery, is perfectly timed to coincide with the election of the first woman of color, Kamala Harris, to be our next Vice President; while the exhibition notably follows on the years-long Black Lives Matter protests that in all likelihood lifted Ms. Harris to the second highest office of the land.

As an African American artist who emerged out of the Black Power movement in the late 1960s, Greenfield has had a long arc of making art of consequence, art with something to say, art with teeth. In his latest exhibition, Black Madonna, Greenfield takes dead aim at centuries of racial supremacy by inverting the very narrative of white dominion: exalting Blackness while simultaneously setting aflame, quite literally, the relentless tide of teeming inhumanity that seeks in all-too-horrific ways to subjugate and enslave. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

From Trauma to Transcendence in The Naked Mind

November 19, 2020 By Genie Davis Leave a Comment

at Track 16, Los Angeles (through December 12)
Reviewed by Genie Davis 

Curated by Georganne Deen, the group show at Track 16 Gallery is perhaps the ultimate exhibition for pandemic times. Titled The Naked Mind, the show features the art of eleven artists including Deen, Liz Young, Eve Wood, Cathy Ward, Samantha Harrison, Christine Wertheim, Laurie Steelink, Rhonda Saboff / Parker Pine, and Lara Allen. The exhibition focuses on the uncovering and understanding of trauma on the human mind. Running through December 12 and available for both virtual viewing on the gallery website and in-person at the Bendix Building, the show also serves as a dazzling tour de force for the artists.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, The Line

Excellence and Thrilling Abundance in LA Louver’s 45 at 45

November 5, 2020 By Eve Wood Leave a Comment

at LA Louver, Los Angeles (through 16 January 2021)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

45 at 45, currently on view at LA Louver in Venice, is an exhibition of epic proportions, not only because of the sheer number of artists included but also because it signifies and celebrates four-and-a-half decades of LA Louver’s luminous and expansive vision. Big group shows can be difficult to navigate, especially if they constitute more of a retrospective-like approach; yet when done right, the plethora of works included create what feels like a variety of intimate conversations. Such is the case here where artworks by represented gallery artists like Matt Wedel and Rebecca Campbell create insightful and sometimes deeply moving interchanges with works by artists the gallery does not necessarily represent but have shown in the past. The breadth of this exhibition is truly impressive, as is the range of work represented, some of which are representational and some of which are not. Either way, the thru line here appears, simply, to be excellence.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, The Line

Stalking Memory to Spy Out One’s Self in Patrick Modiano’s Invisible Ink

October 30, 2020 By John Biscello Leave a Comment

Reviewed by John Biscello

Invisible Ink
by Patrick Modiano
Yale University Press, 176 pp., $24.00

If there is a suitcase, forged documentation, café-life and tons of mileage accumulated tramping the streets of Paris, it’s a pretty safe guess that you are inside a Patrick Modiano novel. The French writer, whose Nobel Prize in 2014 launched him into a new stratosphere of exposure, acclaim and readership (with many of his works now having been translated into English), has been haunting a familiar path, a twilit phantom territory all his own, for the past fifty-plus years. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, The Line

Lockdown Be Damned! Raffaello 1520–1483: An Exhibition in Rome

October 15, 2020 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

at the Scuderie del Quirinale
Reviewed by Ingrid D. Rowland

Raffaello 1520–1483
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Marzia Faietti and Matteo Lafranconi, with Francesco P. Di Teodoro and Vincenzo Farinella Skira
543 pp., €46.00 (paper) (in Italian; an English translation will be published in October 2020)

The New York Review of Books

Like the artist himself, the long-anticipated Raphael exhibition that opened in Rome on March 5, 2020, was struck down by infectious disease. Raphael succumbed to a sudden fever on April 6, 1520, his thirty-seventh birthday. The exhibition that marked the five hundredth anniversary of his death lasted only four days. On March 9, the Italian government issued a decree prohibiting “every form of gathering in public places” to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, and every public institution in Italy shut its doors. Raphael’s birthday came and went with his legacy under lockdown. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Books, The Line

Don DeLillo’s Engrossing Yet Oddly Frictionless New Novella, The Silence

October 12, 2020 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

Reviewed by Dwight Garner

The Silence
by Don DeLillo
Scribner, 128pp., has $19.22
NY Times

Don DeLillo’s slim new novel, The Silence, is a pristine disaster novel with apocalyptic overtones. It’s a Stephen King novel scored by Philip Glass instead of Chuck Berry. A plane from Paris to Newark crash-lands. Two of the main characters are on this flight, and they survive. Power grids have gone down all over the world. Aliens? The Chinese? The Joker? QAnon? [Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, The Line

Dismantling One of the Great Encyclopedic Museums in the Country: The Regrettable LACMA Redesign

October 10, 2020 By Riot Material 1 Comment

by Joseph Giovannini
NYRB Online

“This is a hostile takeover of the museum, and if the design succeeds in hijacking the institution, Los Angeles will be living for a long time with a wanton act of architecture, and the bitter memory of a very expensive betrayal of the public trust.”  —Joseph Giovannini

There are two demolitions going on at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the largest encyclopedic museum west of the Mississippi, with collections spanning many historical periods and cultures. Over the last several months, the museum has razed three of the four structures on the East Campus, the original core of the institution—themselves only sixty years old—and excavators are now polishing off the last and largest, the Ahmanson Building. The East Campus will soon be a bowl of dust. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Architecture, Art, The Line

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The Line

A review of the Raphael exhibition Raffaello 1520–1483, in Rome, Italy, is at Riot Material

Lockdown Be Damned! Raffaello 1520–1483: An Exhibition in Rome

at the Scuderie del Quirinale Reviewed by Ingrid D. Rowland Raffaello 1520–1483 Catalog of the exhibition edited by Marzia Faietti and Matteo Lafranconi, with Francesco P. Di Teodoro and Vincenzo Farinella Skira 543 pp., €46.00 (paper) (in Italian; an English translation will be published in October 2020) The New York Review of Books Like the artist […]

Don DeLillo's new novel, The Silence. A review is at Riot Material

Don DeLillo’s Engrossing Yet Oddly Frictionless New Novella, The Silence

Reviewed by Dwight Garner The Silence by Don DeLillo Scribner, 128pp., has $19.22 NY Times Don DeLillo’s slim new novel, The Silence, is a pristine disaster novel with apocalyptic overtones. It’s a Stephen King novel scored by Philip Glass instead of Chuck Berry. A plane from Paris to Newark crash-lands. Two of the main characters […]

The proposed new design for The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is a disaster, according to Joseph Giovannini, and a "betrayal of the public trust."

Dismantling One of the Great Encyclopedic Museums in the Country: The Regrettable LACMA Redesign

by Joseph Giovannini NYRB Online “This is a hostile takeover of the museum, and if the design succeeds in hijacking the institution, Los Angeles will be living for a long time with a wanton act of architecture, and the bitter memory of a very expensive betrayal of the public trust.”  —Joseph Giovannini There are two […]

A review of Thelonious Monk's Palo Alto

Palo Alto Sees the Thelonious Monk Quartet at its “Final Creative High”

Reviewed by Marty Sartini Garner Palo Alto on Impulse! Pitchfork Thelonious Monk once said: “Weird means something you never heard before. It’s weird until people get around to it. Then it ceases to be weird.” By the time Monk and his quartet strode into the auditorium at Palo Alto High School on October 27, 1968, […]

Archie Shepp Quartet, Stadsteatern, Stockholm, September 1966. An interview with Archie Shepp, September 2020

Music for a Revolution: A Word with Jazz Great Archie Shepp

Interview by Accra Shepp NYRB My father, the saxophonist Archie Shepp, has recorded more than 110 albums since 1962, performed all over the world, and received numerous honors, including the 2016 Jazz Master’s Award from the National Endowment for the Arts. In the 1960s, he helped define “free jazz,” a new idiom in which the […]

Bobby Seale Checks Food Bags. March 31, 1972.

Food As Culture, Identity and an Enduring Form of Black Protest

By Amethyst Ganaway Food & Wine We are demanding, not asking, for “Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice And Peace.” —Amethyst Ganaway Black people in America have used food as a means of resistance, rebellion, and revolution since being forcefully brought here in the late 1500s. Food has always been a part of the culture and […]

A Pandemic Q&A with David Lynch

Pandemic Musings: A From-The-Bag Q&A With David Lynch

 From David Lynch Theater Presents: “Do You Have a Question for David? Part 1”

Erin Currier, American Women (dismantling the border) II. Read the interview with Erin excerpted from Lisette Garcia's new book, Ponderosas, at Riot Material.

An Interview with Erin Currier: Artist, Writer & Activist

by Lisette García and Barrett Martin excerpted from Ponderosas: Conversations with Extraordinary, Ordinary Women  by Lisette García, Ph. D available November 20th Sunyata Books “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And then you have to do it all the time.” –Angela Davis Barrett: I first met Erin Currier and her […]

A review of Mark Lynas's new book, "Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency," is at Riot Material Magazine.

The Earth Commences Her Retalitory Roar

Reviewed by Bill McKibben  Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency by Mark Lynas London: 4th Estate, 372 pp., $27.99 The New York Review of Books So now we have some sense of what it’s like: a full-on global-scale crisis, one that disrupts everything. Normal life—shopping for food, holding a wedding, going to work, […]

Oliver Stone in Vietnam. A review of his new book, Chasing the Light, is at Riot Material

Oliver Stone’s Chasing the Light Chronicles the Great Director’s Journey Against a Raging Historical Backdrop

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo Chasing the Light by Oliver Stone Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 352 pp., $25.20 If there is anything the year 2020 has shaken into the very fabric of our imperial society, it’s that nothing ever goes according to plan, rarely is anything absolutely assured. While a biological threat has upended not only our […]

Toyin Ojih Odutola's wonderful exhibition, A Countervailing Theory, at Barbican Centre, London, is reviewed at Riot Material Magazine

Stories of Creation, Stories For Our Time in Toyin Ojih Odutola’s A Countervailing Theory

at The Barbican, London (through 24 Jan 2021) Reviewed by Christopher P Jones Despite what intuition tells us, history is constantly changing. The revision of the past happens all around us and at all times, sometimes perniciously and sometimes for enlightened reasons. For her first exhibition in the UK, Toyin Ojih Odutola has done a brave and […]

Driving Whle Black, two books reviewed at Riot Material

Segregation on the Highways: A Review of Driving While Black and Overground Railroad

by Sarah A. Seo Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights by Gretchen Sorin Liveright, 332 pp., $28.95 Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America by Candacy Taylor Abrams, 360 pp., $35.00 The New York Review of Books In 1963, after Sam Cooke was […]

A review of Sontag: Here Life and Work is at Riot Material

Losing the Writer in the Personality: A Review of Sontag: Her Life and Work

Reviewed by Michael Gorra Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser Ecco, 816 pp., $39.99 New York Review of Books Susan Sontag began to read philosophy and criticism as a teenager at North Hollywood High, when she still signed her editorials in the school newspaper as “Sue.” She read Kant and La Rochefoucauld, Oswald […]

Darkness Half Visible In Katya Apekina’s The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish

Reviewed by John Biscello The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish by Katya Apekina Two Dollar Radio, 353pp., $12.74 Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall Humpty Dumpty had a great fall; All the king’s horses and all the king’s men Couldn’t put Humpty together again In the name of nursery rhyme remixology, first let us […]

Heads of the Colored People, by Nafissa Thompson-Spires, is reviewed at Riot Material

Histories of Trauma in Heads of the Colored People

Reviewed by Patrick Lohier Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires Thorndike Press, 293pp., $32.99 Harvard Review In Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s debut short story collection, Heads of the Colored People, a doctor suggests that an adolescent girl’s sudden and overwhelming bout of hyperhidrosis is caused by anxiety, and then asks, “Is there a history of trauma?” […]

Lord Krishna speaks to Prince Arjuna about the Gita

Eknath Easwaran’s Lucid, Scholarly and Ever-Timely Preface to the Bhagavad Gita

The Bhagavad Gita Translated by Eknath Easwaran Vintage Books, 122pp., $15.00 Many years ago, when I was still a graduate student, I traveled by train from central India to Simla, then the summer seat of the British government in India. We had not been long out of Delhi when suddenly a chattering of voices disturbed my reverie. I asked […]

A review of Kevin Young's Brown is at Riot Material

To Inter Your Name in Earth: a Review of Kevin Young’s Brown

Reviewed by Kevin T. O’Connor Brown: Poems by Kevin Young Knopf, 176pp., $19.29 Harvard Review In The Book of Hours, his 2011 collection, Kevin Young moved from elegiac responses to the sudden death of his father to reanimating poems on the birth of his son. His new collection, Brown, reverses the trajectory, beginning with “Home Recordings,” […]

Dispatch: Poems, by Cameron Awkward-Rich

Bloom how you must, wild: a Review of Dispatch, by Cameron Awkward-Rich

Reviewed by Flora Field Dispatch by Cameron Awkward-Rich Persea, 80pp., $12.69 Columbia Journal In poetry, a body becomes not just a vehicle through which we move about the world, but the lens from which we write that experience. What does it then mean to comment on the world from a body that exists at the […]

The Monument to Joe Louis, aka "The Fist," as sculpted by Robert Graham

Relic as Horrific Remembrance in the Monument to Joe Louis

by Max King Cap “My father was a little headstrong, my mother was a little armstrong. The Headstrongs married the Armstrongs, and that’s why darkies were born.” — Rufus T. Firefly, Duck Soup, 1933 He had done it before. One can readily find the photographs of his handiwork; two human torsos, headless, the legs amputated just below […]

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Writers

  • Alci Rengifo
  • Allyn Gaestel
  • Ann Landi
  • Annabel Osberg
  • A. Hutter von Arx
  • Barrett Martin
  • Brian Block
  • C von Hassett
  • Christopher Michno
  • Christopher P Jones
  • Cvon
  • Cynthia Biret
  • Donald Lindeman
  • Ellen C. Caldwell
  • Emily Nimptsch
  • Erin Currier
  • Eve Wood
  • Genie Davis
  • Henry Cherry
  • Hoyt Hilsman
  • James McWilliams
  • Jill Conner
  • Johanna Drucker
  • John Biscello
  • John Haber
  • John Payne
  • Kristy Puchko
  • Lisa Zeiger
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