Art

Holding Life Lightly: Crybaby Will Dry Our Tears

by | October 4, 2022

Miah Jeffra reviews Cheryl Klein's fertility and cancer memoir "Crybaby", an exploration of cancer, fertility, eating disorder, queer desire, and the self.

book cover for Crybaby

Honoring Our Literary Ancestors: On Arcelia and Giovanni’s Room

by | November 11, 2021

Organizers of Giovanni's Room unite to honor literary ancestors

acelia portrait

Spelling Cyphers: A Review of Long Division by Kiese Laymon

by | June 24, 2021

The most interesting mystery novels don’t announce themselves as such. There is no murder to solve or culprit to apprehend. Rather, events which have no obvious explanation unfold and an air of ambiguity surrounds them. Kiese Laymon’s novel Long Division belongs to this category of mystery.

Long Division Book Cover

Bankrupt: An Excerpt From Driven: A Kunstlerroman

by | June 15, 2021

In this excerpt from Chris Rice’s hardboiled memoir, an artist dumps her boozehound bankrupt boyfriend, steals what is rightfully hers, herself, and retreats to Venice, California

Hand, cigarette, & empty beer glass

Embodied is an Intertextual and Intersectional Masterpiece

by | May 6, 2021

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.

Embodied Cover

A Good Top is Hard to Find: Revisiting the S&M Classic Leash 20 Years Later

by | April 20, 2021

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.

Leash book cover

Bad Attitude: The Art of Spain Rodriguez Explores the Legacy of a Cartoonist Who Reserved the Right to Objectify

by | March 9, 2021

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 […]

Spain Rodriguez

féi hernandez – Con Y Del Corazón

by | January 7, 2021

féi hernandez writes poetry con y del corazón. Their new collection, Hood Criatura, tells emotionally intimate stories crafted in imagistic Spanglish.

Féi Hernandez

The Owners of the Hattiesburg Pocket Museum in Mississippi Don’t Want You to Find it

by | December 29, 2020

Curious wanderers exploring downtown Hattiesburg, in Mississippi, beware: the smallest museum in the state—perhaps, in the country—is hiding in plain sight.

Hattiesberg Pocket Museum