February 03, 2018
What Is Craft and What Does It Do, Part 1
Craft is a set of expectations.
Craft is a history of power. In other words: history is craft. Craft is a lineage of whose stories are passed down and by whom, what kind of stories are on record.
Craft is both much more and much less than we're taught it is.
Expectations extend to theory of mind. We make stories about every person we see, hear, hear about. We fill in ...
January 29, 2018
Lauren Goodwin Slaughter
PULSE
It was a moth. It resembled a torn piece
of newsprint caught inside the fixed window
in the filthy stairwell of our first apartment.
What could live in such a place, I’d wonder,
passing the moth on my way down to work
at the new teaching gig, outfit in blouse and slacks—
my mother’s words—that did not stretch.
What could live ...
January 24, 2018
For those interested in discussions of power and craft and liberatory aesthetics, you may have been following the covfefe--sorry, the kerfuffle--over Sadia Shepard's story, "Foreign-Returned," in The New Yorker. Shepard's story is a retelling of a Mavis Gallant story, and the Francine Prose of Reading Like a Writer accused Shepard and The New Yorker of plagiarism.
Shepard and Jess Row issued statements via The New ...
January 23, 2018
by Kevin Holton
Annie Kim. Into the Cyclorama. University of Southern Indiana Press, 2016.
It’s often said that wonderful and terrible events shape those who experience them, and in Into the Cyclorama, Annie Kim explores what shapes exactly they create. This book, winner of the 2015 Michael Waters Poetry Prize, brings together twenty-eight poems that don’t simply play with form, but manipulate lyrical ...
