I Unthread and He Arranges Me
Looking, we are reminded again and again, is, too, about being looked at, about where, in the act of looking, agency and power begin and how that changes depending on who is doing the looking.
A selection of recent special features, essays, interviews and reviews
Looking, we are reminded again and again, is, too, about being looked at, about where, in the act of looking, agency and power begin and how that changes depending on who is doing the looking.
Horses, capable of deep knowing, stride alongside animate eyeglasses, mysterious flecks of trash, and coy, almost-ever-present lawnmowers.
“There’s always that impulse to go back and rearrange the decay into something more beautiful than it was . . .” —Laci Mosier
“It occurred to me that, as a nursing mother, I was like a book being eaten by insects—a book offering a type of nourishment to living beings that its author had not intended to deliver.”—Carolina Hotchandani
“When I’m out in the field, weeding or planting or harvesting, sometimes I’m thinking about poems or working on one in my head. But more often I’m simply practicing my capacity to pay attention, which is where poetry, at its root, begins.” —Jessica Poli
An excerpt from Jed Munson’s new collection of essays.
“Poetry can be a means of facilitating one’s experience of the continuity that is ‘underneath’ the artificially-imposed partitionings.”
“The poem is an experience largely because of how its sounds turn its reader’s body into an instrument.”—Daniela Molnar
“What I have discovered in my adult life, in my driving and commuting life, is that I love birds of prey.” —M. Soledad Caballero
by Aditi Bhattacharjee | Contributing Writer Ina Cariño’s Feast (Alice James books, 2023) is a fearless debut that combines their personal story with the political history of the Philippines to express the aftereffects of colonization and migration. The collection explores a hunger for identity, ancestry, geography at the intersection of liminality, among other things. The poems in the book are replete with beautiful food images that help in creating the worlds that the narrator enlivens for the audience. The raw authenticity of the narrator’s voice brings us closer to navigating questions of otherness at different levels that people of color feel on a daily basis. I was very grateful to be able to have a conversation about their process in writing this collection via a Google Doc. Aditi Bhattacharjee (AB): I am fascinated with the universe you have created in “Feast,” which is rich with mountains, loam, archipelago, tropical fruits, milk, vines, butterfly, beetle, finches, sari-sari stores, haranas, dandelion-clocks, dreamsongs and, underneath all of that, one also finds the images of nicked thumbs, swollen bottom …