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Contemporaries Essays, The Pain Cluster

Free and Unfeeling?

Pain has an element of blank.— Emily Dickinson Much of my work in recent years has been to think through the relationship between my scoliosis-related disabilities and my writing practice,…

Issue 4: Political Reaction and the Politics of Slapstick, Peer Reviewed Articles

Free Trade Comedy: Slapstick Toggling in Global Supply Chains

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…

Issue 4: Political Reaction and the Politics of Slapstick, Peer Reviewed Articles

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….

Issue 4: Political Reaction and the Politics of Slapstick, Peer Reviewed Articles

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….

Contemporaries Essays, The Body of Contemporary Latina/o/x Poetry

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…

Contemporaries Essays, The Body of Contemporary Latina/o/x Poetry

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….

Contemporaries Essays, The Body of Contemporary Latina/o/x Poetry

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…

Contemporaries Essays, The Body of Contemporary Latina/o/x Poetry

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…

Contemporaries Essays, The Body of Contemporary Latina/o/x Poetry

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…

Contemporaries Essays, The Body of Contemporary Latina/o/x Poetry

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…