Today’s classrooms are battlegrounds for political and cultural conflicts. Are teachers prepared to serve on the front lines? Despite being set at a school, Lau Yee-Wa’s debut novel Tongueless provides […]
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Joyelle McSweeney’s Death Styles does what poems ought to do—attempt to give us experience, the derivative of event, the lines that represent acceleration in describing the actual speedometer markings. It’s […]
Read MoreOne does not need to understand the world to artistically express it. In fact, it seems that often the latter occurs in the terrifying moments when the former is revealed […]
Read MoreWhen my children were toddlers, they enjoyed a lift-the-flap book by author and illustrator Karen Katz called Where Is Baby’s Mommy? I found the title both amusing and alarming. Why […]
Read MoreLast November I tuned in to the latest episode of the newsmagazine 60 Minutes with great interest. I’ve been watching since I was a child—back then it was our weekly […]
Read MoreHow do we begin to comment on the legacies, dreams, and stories of our ancestors? How could we not comment? What if we never knew a grandparent or ancestor personally […]
Read MoreWhat is the sonnet’s relationship to place? Phillis Levin, in The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, defines the genre through spatial terms: “The sonnet is a monument of praise, a […]
Read MoreSaretta Morgan’s Alt-Nature opens with these lines: “I want to wake every morning into love, / where love is the question of how I’m going to help you get free, […]
Read MoreIn Averno, Louise Glück’s poetic engagement with the Persephone myth, she writes: “the tale of Persephone / . . . should be read // as an argument between the mother […]
Read More“ ‘Communication’ is a registry of modern longings,” writes media theorist John Durham Peters in Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. “The term evokes a utopia […]
Read MoreThe opening pages of Lindsey Harding’s Pilgrims 2.0 introduce a world that is familiar, but slightly off-kilter. A cruise ship is being prepared to set sail, only the purpose of […]
Read MoreToday in China the events of 1989 in Tiananmen Square are a taboo subject. They’re not taught in textbooks or memorialized in museums. Many young people don’t even know about […]
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