Yard Show – Janice N. Harrington
The Black yard show is in dialogue with the Middle American landscape; the padlocked garden and the pockmarked prairie blur each other’s boundaries.
Maybe for the reader, the book itself is like a substitute for a crime, or a certain kind of violence which might otherwise have been turned on the world somehow.
Characters, like Lim’s stylistic choices, shift and transform . . . The novel suggests identity is a beguiling, perhaps not even achievable thing: just mirror, marriage, and mirage.
Mahato’s poetic attention interacts with ideas and observations about community and climate, and the spaces in her language are literally filled in with color.
The Folly of Philanthropy: On the Demise of UArts
In the end, a long-term structural operating deficit killed UArts, not a capital fundraising shell game or evil provost.
Cuckoo – Gretchen Felker-Martin
While drugs and very vaguely defined anti-social behavior were often cited as the cause for warehousing kids in violent dormitories, queer youth experienced an added layer of horror, often sent here as part of aggressive “conversion therapies” . . .
Whenever I see that “ever since I was a little girl I knew I wanted to be on the computer a lot” meme, I’m like, lol, yes, I truly did.
Vague Predictions and Prophecies – Daisuke Shen
In Daisuke Shen’s short story collection . . . characters don’t make choices, exactly. They rebound and ricochet like sentient pinballs, plunged into a psychotic god’s arcade game.
Low: Notes on Art and Trash – Jaydra Johnson
Most of our social processes involving trash are designed to remove it from consciousness: out of sight, out of mind. Johnson’s goal is the opposite. She aims to spur a renewed awareness of trash.
Coming Out Like a Porn Star – ed. Jiz Lee
The declaration that “sex sells” is not to be taken lightly at all—nor the labor of the industry’s workers.