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Autumn Journal on Autumn Journal: 12-13

November 17, 2020 - By Michael Thurston

Read Part 11 here

“These days are misty, insulated, mute”

We are at the midpoint of autumn and the midpoint of the poem, far enough into both to realize that the incessant endings signaled by earlier sunsets, falling leaves, the endings of days/seasons/years/relationships, and the poet’s own dithering, are themselves only the prelude and necessary condition for new beginnings. Autumn brings cycles to MacNeice’s mind, and as we saw at the end of section XI, “No one can stop the cycle.” Nevertheless, the two mid-most sections of Autumn Journal form a moment of more emphatic rejection than we find elsewhere in the...

Love Poem and Response

November 15, 2020 - By Roque Dalton and Katherine Silver

(Photo: Lines from Roque Dalton's Poema de Amor on a wall near the offices of Al Otro Lado in Tijuana, México, courtesy of Katherine Silver)
 

Roque Dalton

10 Questions for Amanda Kabak

November 13, 2020 - By Edward Clifford

When Angie answers a knock at our door, this girl, Molly, starts talking a blue streak, each word rendering Angie smaller and more pale until I finally understand what Angie must have from the beginning: this girl is her daughter, a daughter I know nothing about, an entire daughter Angie never once mentioned to me in our decade together. Since we get closer to sharing everything than any other couple I know, I would turn this girl away in disbelief, but she has Angie's eyes and chin and voice, and we move inexorably inside until they are sitting at our small, round kitchen table, and I am hovering around the edges, barren in my uselessness.
—from "Unsafe Haven," Volume 61,...

The Offending Classic

November 12, 2020 - By Tanya Jayani Fernando

Introduction: The Classic and the Offending Classic

Cover Image: William Blake, Oberon, Titania, and Puck with Fairies Dancing. (circa 1786). Pencil and watercolor, 1’7” x 2’ 3” [From William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream] 

Last year, dance historian Mark Franko published an essay in the Massachusetts Review on Jerome Robbins’s Opus Jazz, where he argued that Robbins uses Black aesthetic forms to create an American classic. In a moment where our society is splintering along racial lines, Franko has reminded us that American art is hybrid and can point to another reality—one of unity. Within...

The Story Behind the Statistics

November 11, 2020 - By Nefeli Forni

Cherry by Nico Walker (Knopf, 2018)

Last year the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the NIH declared that 130 people in the United States die after overdosing on opioids every day. Multiples more overdose and survive, as did the narrator of Cherry, a ferocious and exhilarating, typewritten-from-prison debut novel by Nico Walker. Told in the first person by a nameless young man, the narrative charts his course through a constellation of crises afflicting contemporary life in the U.S., crises that threaten to erase his story entirely, folding it into yet another austere NIH statistic. Like nearly three million others since the declaration of the U.S. War...