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Perceptive and Prophetic
Hesperus Press collected four long-neglected critical essays for their new collection, Virginia Woolf’s On Fiction. Her criticism, like her fiction, is an utter delight.George Orwell’s 1946 essay...
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Surviving a For-Profit School
There were warning signs. Red flags. Flares in the big empty sky. The school was located in a series of strip malls along a highway in a shitty part of town, but close enough to a nice part to appear,...
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Boy’s Club
From the edge of the pool, the water looks a perverse picture-book blue. I am alone here on this strange alien planet inhabited by glistening nude Martian men. I believe they can sense that I’m an...
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Kerouac’s House and the End of Doubt
“…the end of the continent and the end of doubt, all dull doubt and tomfoolery, good-by.” - Kerouac, On The RoadFreight trains pass a few times a day, but it’s the ones after midnight that I notice...
View ArticleIn Mourning
Over at Lit Hub, Christopher Soto (aka Loma) reflects on Orlando and writes movingly about the experience of holding an identity that is constantly targeted and executed in our world: He propped me up...
View ArticleThis Week in Posivibes: New York Philharmonic
To kick off its series of free concerts in Central Park, the New York Philharmonic is paying tribute to the victims of the shooting at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub. Alan Gilbert, the Philharmonic’s music...
View ArticleFrank Ocean’s Plea for Beauty after Orlando
Frank Ocean has released a message about the Orlando shooting that is mournfully beautiful in both its reflection on the hate that fueled the attacks and the hope for a counter-balancing beauty to...
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Boyz n the Hood, Chi-Raq, and America 2016
During the introductory scene of John Singleton’s 1991 Boyz n the Hood, ten-year-old Tre Styles (Desi Arnex Heinz II) is walking home from school with his backpack-clad classmates down a suburban...
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The Rumpus Interview with Monica Sok
Monica Sok never stops working. Though we didn’t share any classes together during our overlapping year at the NYU Creative Writing Program, I knew enough about her poems not to miss Year Zero, her...
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The Rumpus Interview with Saleem Haddad
This was the first time my mail had been stolen. Someone must have seen the package outside my apartment: they tore the envelope open, took the contents, and tucked the evidence under my doormat....
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Otter
“I dreamed in a dream of a city where all the men were like brothers” –Walt Whitman, “Live Oak, with Moss” I was hella lonely, as they would say there, in my Bay Area neighborhood of baby strollers...
View ArticleNational Poetry Month Day 12: celeste doaks
Poet and journalist celeste doaks is the author of Cornrows and Cornfields (Wrecking Ball Press, UK, 2015). Cornrows was listed as one of the “Ten Best Books of 2015” by Beltway Quarterly Poetry. Doaks...
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Moving Targets
I am four when my sister is born in Greenville, South Carolina. My parents are educated, but we struggle economically. I am easing you into this story—that in itself is a luxury. We move to Memphis,...
View ArticleNational Poetry Month Day 16: Sandra Simonds
Sandra Simonds is the author of six books of poetry: Orlando, (Wave Books, April 2018), Further Problems with Pleasure, winner of the 2015 Akron Poetry Prize from the University of Akron Press, Steal...
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Diner Boys
There’s a photograph of me at nineteen dressed as a diner waitress—acrylic nails, red pumps, apron tied around a red checkered dress. I’m standing in my college living room just before the school’s...
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