Category: Entertainment
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Braver Than You Think
When I sat down to write this reflection on the book Braver Than You Think by Maggie Downs, it seemed to me a really weird thing to do. I almost never review books on the site anymore and I’m not really reviewing one now. I almost never — in a decade of doing this stuff — do…
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Bad Intellectual: The Houellebecqian Case of Catherine Perez-Shakdam
Alors, les Français sont en train de flatter l’islam bien.Sadegh Hedayat Once, one of the Iranian politicians in the Parliament of Iran during his speech accounted a brief conversation with arteshbod Hossein Fardoust, some years after 1979. Fardoust was a friend of Shah and one of the most influential figures of SAVAK—in the last meeting…
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Poezak : a Manifesto
Poetry has been afflicted with meaning for too long. Certainly, there have been stabs at meaninglessness—dada, language poetry, flarf—but without a sustaining podium, without a venue, these movements have flared and died like matches struck and cupped in the general dark of meaningfulness. But the podium has been awaiting us, brightly lit and stark. The…
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Sunset Park shooting and the 500 Eggs
As some of you know, living in the neighborhood through the Sunset Park shooting was tricky to navigate — to say the least. Also hard. 10 neighbors shot from 33 rounds a few houses away from Bobby Constantino whom I interviewed for this piece on gun violence. For years, family and acquaintances and some close…
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Ether
I go with my wings to the edge of the earth, I deliberate faith and the breaking of eggs. Oh, oh, I moved here against the vacuum of your wanting for love; I’m continentally-far with these wide- swooping crows. You’re the edge of the earth falling away from my toes. You’re the turquoise planes of…
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Absence
The air conditioner disturbs the birds, the church bells; they think these things are calling to them. Does this mean anything to you, as you mourn this or that, as big rain falls from a blue sky? Probably not in your lifetime will you conceive of such magnanimous panic—searching the white skies over, over for…
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Art in Heartache
Of all the many waves curling onward in the river, of all the green things growing upward from the earth, I won’t say I know you, I won’t say I miss you, I won’t say I I I at all in this poem. What space then for the study of the shape of the boats,…
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You Are Not An Idolatrous Creature of the Earth
You Are Not an Idolatrous Creature of the Earth Imperatives Name definitively the body parts of a tree. A possibility becomes possible In becoming distinct. It’s hard to say: Today the sky is the shape of corpse. The collapsible shape of corpse, the perverse absence of the storm coming, feel Your body like a rock…
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The Way the Birds Call
It was the early morning after a big snow and the sun had just come out from the clouds. Even still, the ground had kept its heat from earlier, hot spring days. Instead of sticking and freezing, it had turned the road into deep mud. Just another day of that familiar thick clay Ed was…
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Two Pear Trees
Soon I’ll forget my grandfather’s garden and the way the two pear trees stand. I’ll forget afternoon visits, stuffing his freezer with zip-locked meats. Below us, garlic hangs in a cellar above canned sauce, the caps dated in Sharpie. Soon I’ll forget the way he shows me the first ripe pear, nodding — proud, as…
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Accent Piece
Hydrangea in a beer bottle, How did you end up there? Who decided to pluck your beauty, And wrap it up In a Pabst blue ribbon? Yet look at you. With your ivory coif And those jade shoulders. Who gave you the right, To look like home?
