There’s something uncanny in reading Bernadette Mayer’s conceptual projects of memory and thought. Was it in Moving (“This is an epic of war fever fighting sex & starvation.”) or Memory…
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Contemporaries Essays, The Midwinter Constellation
Contemporaries Essays, The Midwinter Constellation
Introduction to Midwinter Constellation
On December 22, 2018, the 40th anniversary of Bernadette Mayer’s writing of her epic of dailiness, Midwinter Day, 31 women poets joined me in typing into six Google Docs labeled…
Bernadette Mayer, Contemporaries Essays
Let the plants reproduce!
I live in a rented flat and the garden I am growing — a square of cracked cement cornered by two narrow beds — is the property of a man…
Bernadette Mayer, Contemporaries Essays
BUT EVERYTHING’S OUTSIDE
KAY: So let’s talk about “The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica.” Mayer’s poem first appeared in her 1976 book Poetry, originally published by the Kulchur Foundation, available for download…
African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century, Contemporaries Essays
A Fugitive Strain: Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist and the Joke of Race
Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist stages a confrontation. A noir detective novel backlit by the subtle irony of postmodern knowingness, the enigmatic debut of its now doubly-Pulitzered author seeds its mysteries…
African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century, Contemporaries Essays
Stick to the Script?! No, Stick It to the Man!
Satire is hard. As a genre that hinges on the hazy boundary between the literal and the figurative, it is vulnerable to distortion and misunderstanding. To master this particularly unforgiving…
African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century, Contemporaries Essays
Black Millennial Satire
Over the last few years, Black Millennials have taken African American satire in a fresh new direction. Against early comedies that played to respectability politics, and under the influence of…
African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century, Contemporaries Essays
Awkward Prose and Satirical Didacticism
“At only eleven years of age, I was a cyber ho.” So begins Issa Rae’s memoir, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl. Her opening line immediately confronts readers with awkwardness,…
African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century, Contemporaries Essays
Introduction: Twenty-First-Century African American Satire
Tiffany Haddish laughs to keep from crying and, in many cases, to keep from dying: both literal, physical death and the spiritual death that comes with a denial of selfhood….
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