Written in semi-quarantine with my two young daughters in 2018 (my husband had a stomach virus and we were trying to avoid infecting my mother, whose home we were visiting…
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Contemporaries Essays, The Midwinter Constellation
Contemporaries Essays, The Midwinter Constellation
Heim
It mattered to me that Midwinter Day was 40 because I was 40, too. I was fudging, a bit — just two weeks from my 41st birthday. Had I been…
Contemporaries Essays, The Midwinter Constellation
Tate
The invitation to revisit Midwinter Day and write in collaborative homage was an invitation to return to the book I’d cut my scholarly teeth on. Rereading Mayer’s lists, walks, and…
Contemporaries Essays, The Midwinter Constellation
Workman
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…
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…