Essays

Must Different Always Mean Marginal?

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For Black people, the opportunity to explore and indulge non-racial angst is a sacred but not always convenient or respected imperative.

Desiring Beyond the Impasse

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Instead of approaching these works as cautionary tales that invite us to be grateful for what we have, we could read them as a reflection of a violent landscape of desire.

Two Views on Encounter and Impasse

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Because humanity in the flesh is prohibited within it, the DMZ as a domain not only compels but also in a sense, in its current state, requires speculation.

“There is Almost Not an Interval”: Composing in Steinian Time

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Stein’s process moves in a way that creates an artifice of ambiguity and forms a structure that can reconfigure infinitely. There is a disruptive function to her use of repetition, a disorienting pulse.

Nonfiction’s Liquid State

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To the reading eye, a solid block of text suggests a takeover. It demands immersion. It may not be easy to find your place once you look up from the page. It reminds us of the body’s limits.

Silent, Still, Singing, Still: Two Poets in Chorus

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Look closely, and all things seem to have been touched by someone’s pain—all things optical, chemical, mechanical. Everything blossoms in destruction, everything is a deathly flower.

Keeping the Bear Afloat: Lessons from Diane di Prima’s Small Press Legacy

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Fast-paced political publishing still exists, often a display of the power and potential that lies in thinking big and publishing “small.”

Love in the Korean Demilitarized Zone

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The appeal to love as a revelatory force is at once a familiar rhetorical strategy for galvanizing peninsular unification platforms and a basic generative paradigm for imagining other worlds emotionally.

Beyond Belief Amongst the Millennials

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What would happen if we looked at the spiritual picture of millennial America through a lens less of function or form but of power, understood historically?

The Headmistress, Interpreted

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The plan was to say adieu and die, alone, by the pond. And if this was indeed her plan, it was a plan that went spectacularly awry.