Currently Browsing: poetry
On October 8, 2021 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan opened a new exhibition: Etel Adnan: Light’s New Measure. By the time the exhibition closed — on January 10, 2022 – the artist had passed. The fact that Etal was 96 when she died made the cultural moment all the more triumphant — a perfect capstone to an illustrious career.… read more.
FF2 Guest post by Hannah Lamb-Vines
The news cycle spins like a washing machine in the final stages of a heavy-duty wash. It’s been speeding up for decades, while we watch from the other side of the thick glass door, helpless, hoping our clothes come out clean but doubting they will. The apocalypse has arrived, probably, in the form of climate crisis fueled by unimaginable wealth disparity, or in the daily heartbreaks that we don’t want to believe keep happening: school shootings, protestors arrested for defending their ancestral land from developers, threats to Roe v.… read more.
In the last book she published while alive, Shifting The Silence, writer and multi-disciplinary artist Etel Adnan declares: “I am not in a hurry to live, I am not in a hurry to die; I am just talking to you.”
The stream of consciousness that flows throughout the intimate prose of the publication is one that collapses together the looming uncertainty of death with the calm simplicity of living the everyday.… read more.
We are taught that a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. We are taught that a girl who ventures on a quest to find her lost parents will become whole when she finds them; we are taught that this girl will find happiness.
But the truth is, life doesn’t usually happen in this way. Sometimes the “story begins at an impasse” as Patrice Staiger writes.… read more.
FF2 Guest post by Hannah Lamb-Vines
I’ve never read a novel like Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s Dreaming of You before. In the novel in verse, a poet — who also happens to be named Melissa Lozada-Oliva — uses technology-infused ritual magic to resurrect Tejano pop star Selena Quintanilla-Pérez. Selena’s brief career and dramatic murder on March 31, 1995, at age 23, had a massive impact on pop culture and particular significance within the Latin American diaspora (of which Lozada-Oliva is a member).… read more.
