Under cloudy skies the color of her eyes, Kumru walks her 10-speed, bitches: Midwood feels like a Turkish village stocked with fanatics of various faiths. Kumru walks her 10-speed, bitches. A neighbor asked was she from Holland. Fanatics of various … [Read more...]

When they invented the car, they invented the collision.—David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, p.178 Last week I had occasion to pilot an automobile for the first time since the summer of 2005. Wishing to visit a 94-year-old friend … [Read more...]

A baby cried, reminded me of death in the midst of my headache walk. Rough work to carve a self. What else was there to do? In the midst of my headache walk, the evening lamps were lit. What else was there to do? The street glowed, softly white as the … [Read more...]

I’ve got a mad passionate crush on a text: Locas: The Maggie and Hopey Stories, A Love and Rockets Book, by Jaime Hernandez (Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books, 2004). I’d seen occasional references to the Hernandez Brothers’ graphic narratives over the years; Junot … [Read more...]

  NY Wants Poor to Help Pay in Housing Crisis while the children suffered and died the two adults had taken heroin in a torture chamber called home lock up the monsters who did this the two adults had taken heroin while threats rattled at nuclear … [Read more...]

A teacher's intellectual life is often a lonely one. Over the last two weeks I've been teaching, or failing to teach, Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story to my undergraduate “Reading for Writers” class, The Queer Renaissance. Failing to teach, I say, because it’s … [Read more...]

William Gass came to read at my workplace the other day. I’d read next to nothing of his work before the pending event sent me running to the library for In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, so I wouldn’t seem too out of it. I’m absolutely in love with “The … [Read more...]

I wake up in the night and think about Iran and bird flu, bird flu in Iran and bird flu and Iran. I think that bird flu is in Nigeria. I feel ashamed for thinking that I don’t care too much about bird flu being in Nigeria but only that this increases the likelihood … [Read more...]

It’s late and I’m weary—teaching tomorrow—but wanting to write something in the way of idiosyncratic personal tribute to Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera. I’m reading the book right now with my class “Reading the Queer Renaissance.” I couldn’t, or let’s … [Read more...]

John Yau, whose art criticism in American Poetry Review always interests me despite or perhaps because of my ignorance about visual art, has an intriguing piece on Jasper Johns in the January/February issue (pp. 43-50). His thesis is that Johns has all along been … [Read more...]