2012 July

The Sanctity of Birth

After years of anticipation for some, just nine months for others, birth is the single most important event of every human being’s life. Regardless of how much this event has been denigrated to a medical procedure, it is a special day – every single year, most of us observe the occasion and are aware that […]

Melville the Television

Melville the Television

Lucky for us, popular culture does not need to be affirmed or denied. It’s happening, and you and I, as members of the populace, are in it. This is not to say that there are not all sorts of ways to bargain with our position, en masse or otherwise. But this is to say that […]

Contents May Contain:

Consumption of The Autobiographical Novel             Justin Torres’ We the Animals is an admittedly autobiographical novel. Torres takes advantage of fiction’s freedoms as he pays attention to the careful placement of each object in each room. Like a doll’s house, it is the perfect replication of an image, a created memory. The reader is allowed […]

Sports Injuries

by Tyler Collison 1 The day’s focus was plyometrics—jump training. For roughly twenty minutes at the end of every volleyball practice, we would systematically hop around like frogs and one-legged kangaroos. In the matches prior to the discussed day, though, we hadn’t been “doing somethings amazing,” as our Romanian coach, Radu, would so adamantly and […]

Tayari Jones - Silver Sparrow

Review – Silver Sparrow

Tayari Jones’ novel Silver Sparrow tells itself in memory and present, retrospect and retelling. The prose simply happens. It slips underneath and into you. Moves you from inside. Poised in history but set in the intimacy of individuals, Jones calls forward icons and minutiae with equal reverie. Her details are invocations, passages through which characters […]

Arana

Don’t Forget to Check Spiders for Your Shoes

y sin que olviden sus típicas arañas… José Alfredo Jiménez If you’d have known the fame these suckers had, you wouldn’t have ushered so many outdoors when you’ve found them posted up perpendicular to the floor in the shadow on the back of your dresser, or in the perpetually dusky corner of your shower stall. […]

Poem/CounterPoem: Williams

Poem This installment draws down against William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All, specifically, XXI: “The Red Wheelbarrow”. You know this. so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. and so: CounterPoem define this(object) (reference self whole) or (reference not that) define was(subject object) (is past tense) or (used […]