Disco Elysium is one of those RPGs that it feels like you alone have played. I knew so many people playing at the same time as me, but I didn’t…
Contemporaries Essays
Disco Elysium and Narrative Superposition
Early in Disco Elysium, Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi arrives at the Whirling-in-Rags, the hostel where the player character, Harry Du Bois, has just emerged from an alcoholic spiral so intense as…
Introduction to Reading Disco Elysium
Inland Empire: DETECTIVEEsprit-De-Corps: ARRIVINGAuthority: ON THE SCENE Disco Elysium (2019) is an open-world roleplaying video game that opens with a familiar premise: the player character wakes up in a motel room with no…
Cleaning Women: Occupational Health and Broken Solidarities
For almost seven years, from February 1, 1957 until her marriage in 1963, Lorine Niedecker worked as a cleaner at the Fort Atkinson Memorial Hospital. She was 53 years old…
Rueful Proximities: Lorine Niedecker, Queer Affection, and Lyric Drag
Lorine is not Bette nor Billie nor Marlene nor Lena nor Joan nor Judy. But, she is a queer icon. Niedecker’s iconicity stems from the distinctiveness of her habitus and…
The Marsh
[ bounce page ]
Niedecker’s New Goose: Settler Colonialism on the Cusp of the Great Acceleration
In the opening poem of her 1946 collection New Goose, Lorine Niedecker pulls her readers into the marsh and situates us in a very specific position — that of the…
Pumps and Plovers: Lorine Niedecker and the Critique of Cybernetic Ecology
In 1962, after more than fifteen years of living without running water, Lorine Niedecker finally got plumbing.1 The installation of pipes, toilet, and sink was a major event in the…
Poet’s Poet: Hoa Nguyen Alongside Lorine Niedecker
From the secret notes I must tilt upon pressure execute and adjust1 One doesn’t possess poetry or a poet. Poet’s poet: does this mean a famous unknown celebrated by other relative unknowns?…
Another Long Stretch of Geologic Time: Lorine Niedecker’s “Lake Superior”
“Probably all it means is another long stretch of geologic time before anything really gets printed. The only time the lava flows is those moments while the poems are being…