We should note from the outset that slapstick is named not after the genre from which it originally derives but from that genre’s defining prop. Although most often associated with…
Archive for January, 2020
Gag Reflexes: Sex Doll Slapstick and Fran Ross’s Oreo
Kirk came out of his corner with his nose wide open. As he advanced, his stallion did an impressive caracole right, a no-slouch caracole left, then majestically reared its head….
Norman Mailer and “The Mary McCarthy Case” Revisited
The runaway success of Mary McCarthy’s The Group, a novel about the lives of eight Vassar graduates during the 1930s, was one of the most sensational literary events of 1963….
Lamentation, Remembrance, the Body
Remembrance, as it works through the body, moves in shapes and sensations. Remembrance can be an ache, a tickle, a warmth, a cringe, a sigh; it can end up with…
The Border’s Bright Dead Things: On Ada Limón’s Embodied Poetics
Late in June 2019, like many others worldwide, I viewed, aghast, the photograph of the drowned bodies of 26-year-old Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his 23-month-old daughter, Valeria….
Black Latina Girlhood Poetics of the Body: Church, Sexuality and Dispossession
Like Xiomara, the teenage protagonist of Elizabeth Acevedo’s poetry novel The Poet X, I was always afraid of getting disciplina — of getting caught up and revealed as an imposter…
Slow Encounter
I Natalie Diaz writes, “In my Mojave culture, many of our songs are maps.” Diaz does not mean this in the sense of a settler colonial map. They do not…
Poetry, Pulse, and the Anthology
It has been over three years since forty-nine people were murdered at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Public attention has waned. But for certain communities, it is impossible…
Afro-Boricua Archives: Paperless People and Photo/Poetics as Resistance
In her monograph, Boricua Literature, Lisa Sánchez González argues that in the face of national, colonial, and institutional erasure, Boricuas — the Taíno-derived demonym for Puerto Ricans — find themselves…
The Body of Contemporary Latina/o/x Poetry
Among scholars and teachers of Latina/o/x literature, it has become commonplace in recent years to speak about the vitality of poetry, which has long been subordinated to narrative in research…