“Oh, how delicious and practical it is that people think us strange . . . ” — Hilda Hilst, Letters from a Seducer, translated by John Keene At the outset…
Contemporaries Essays
Severance, Stuckness, and the Hurricane Fix
This essay focuses on a fleeting climate crisis event in Ling Ma’s 2018 novel Severance. For super smart critical work on Severance you should go to the Post-45 cluster on…
On Being Stuck at Customs: The Poems of Solmaz Sharif
Solmaz, have you thanked your executioner today? — “Social Skills Training”1 These are the first questions I received after giving a virtual talk on my book Climate Lyricism: Aren’t the…
“Of course, the world continues to end”: Weather and the Climate Crisis Ordinary
The sense of slow-motion apocalypse indexed in my title, spoken by a character in Jenny Offill’s 2020 novel Weather, resonates widely. In early 2020 — just a few weeks before…
Dyspossession: Notes on the Black Commons
In the abolitionist radical David Walker’s 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, he offers an anecdote about the difficulties Black people in the United States have acquiring…