I could go on and on about these collaborations, but I don’t have enough space here to describe how wonderfully, gloriously, and lovingly enthralling they are. There are poems about birth and the body, stories of misogyny at a university and of grappling with a miscarriage. These works explore heritage, family, gender, love, and in the case of the inimitable Diane Seuss, tits. Altogether, they typify the robust state of contemporary poetry.

Who deserves to feel the pain of anti-Asian violence? Who deserves to take up space with their rage? As a mixed-race person, am I allowed to be here? Do I belong?

A story of workplace abuse: “Saftey words are for Pussies!” read the misspelled Roy-Lichtenstein-does-BDSM faux pop art painting displayed in the office of the Anonymous Sex Toy Company. "Safe, Sane, and Consensual" was the company motto. None of the men running the company understood those slogans were incompatible.

The Hard Crowd offers us a portrait of Kushner through her preoccupations, obsessions, concerns, affinities, and distastes. Her writing on others is always writing about the self and in this sense, she is always doing donuts, flashing the lens externally so as to make an entire revolution, pointing the eye inward once again.

In rock musician Michelle Zauner's memoir "Crying in H-Mart", food is not just a vessel to memorialize her mother but a touchstone for accessing her Korean heritage.

In Leash transgressive sex functions less as a subject, or site of guaranteed liberation, and more as a framework to explore how power moves through us, trapping us even as it promises to liberate us. In the age of pink-washed internet activism, DeLynn’s writing is a prescient reminder that any radical transformation of our sex lives, much less society, will never be painless.

The blackout has left me with time to reflect on my Texas childhood. A daughter of immigrants, white-washed and shamed for my brownness and non-compliance to the Texas Way, this blackout has ignited an anger I've felt for most of my life. The failure of Texas goes beyond wifi. It is a failure of ethos.

If we stop to examine our family tree, it becomes obvious that Lil Nas X is the fulfillment of Little Richard’s dreams. In a world where neoliberal gayness has taught us that the best we can hope for is Lady Gaga belting out the national anthem while deportations mount, Lil Nas X charitably tossed us a Zyrtec.

In the past five months, incidents of women getting threatened, hurt, or killed at their American workplaces appeared on national news. On November 12, the NY Post outed a paramedic as a sex worker, resulting in a barrage of threats. The exposure also jeopardized her job. On January 6, we saw Congresswomen hide in their offices in lockdown while gallows were being erected for them outside their work building. On March 16, we learned that six women in Atlanta were killed when a mass shooter came into their place of work. It’s clear from these incidents that the prestige, location, or salary of a woman’s job has no bearing on how safe she is at work. When society normalizes gender-based violence in the home, it also normalizes gender-based violence in the workplace.

What makes the accusations against Matt Gaetz so plausible is the ubiquity of men like him. Many of them work for state, like my former coworker John William Gunde, a high school teacher arrested for sex with a minor, currently on paid administrative leave.

A young Black person is ticketed and almost arrested for jaywalking by a maskless cop who believes his helmet will protect him from covid-19. Meanwhile down the street, a white woman operates a dine-in restaurant against the law, with 22 citations from the city and gas bootlegged from a neighboring apartment building. Jasmin Roberts explores the highly uneven and racialized application of the law in Long Beach.

When Black Lives Matter was formed I imagine they weren't thinking about their hashtag becoming a marketing ploy, Unfortunately the hashtag has become synonymous with feel-good #woke consumerism and brand building on the backs of public lynchings of Black people by our police state. It has launched the sales of enamel pins, baseball hats, (unironically) hoodies, and now, food. Their tenacious appeal to celebrity-driven U.S. capitalism is truly impressive. As long as our grief is a product to sell to the bourgeois, who are we to disagree?

I make pilgrimages and I drove to Palm Springs, a town haunted by Truman Capote’s ghost. Photo essay and words.

Pola Oloixarac’s Mona (translated from Spanish by Adam Morris) is a devastating and harrowing satire of the literary world, an alternately hilarious and piercing examination of the culture surrounding books.

The word girl is cool, but woman is often more accurate. Though this problem might seem harmless, it isn’t. Referring to a girl as a woman is inappropriate because it assumes a sense of maturity that hasn’t yet developed. Referring to a woman as a girl disrespects us. It erases a woman’s maturity.

When battered women "move on," sometimes, we "start over" in a new home that's, in many ways, a reconstitution of our old home. We might not be sharing walls or a roof with the piece of shit who fucked us up but the weapons he used remain. Weapons like a bed. They don't look like weapons. They look like ordinary things. That's what's so frightening about them.

Amy Poehler's Moxie is the narrative version of Feminist Organizing 101, made with the white, teenage set in mind. If that sounds tiring, know that Poehler brings her singular ability to make do-gooding fun and while its white feminist reach is limited, Moxie manages to inspire.

Toward the end of her documentary Bad Attitude: The Art of Spain Rodriguez, director Susan Stern asks in voice-over, “Did I make this film to defend Spain? Or to defend myself?” It’s a telling question, one important enough to justify Stern briefly putting the focus on herself and taking it away from her husband and […]

I’ve only been out of work for 11 days at this point. Yet I awake each morning to an attached PDF, an embedded link, or a “heads up” on some new job. Through the morning haze, it’s typically the first alert I see on my phone. For some asinine reason, everyone finds grounding in their […]

"A queer Black future is a future that allows me to envision a better reality for Black people everywhere…it is also a future that reckons with all the violence and retaliation that we will experience to get to that future. I also think that the future is now"