A Website of the Radical Imagination
When Ta-Nehisi Coates was trying to make sense of the world as a young student, his first working theory “held all black people as kings in exile, a nation of original men severed from our original names and our majestic Nubian culture.” With help from teachers at Howard, Coates thought his way out of compensatory … Read more
P.W. Singer and August Cole have just published Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War. They seem to have a lot in common: both have B.A.s and advanced degrees from various Ivies, both seem admirably well-connected in the think tanks and a number of adjacent worlds, both possess what seem to be glittering … Read more
In memory of the failed Cuban Revolution, 1956-2014 A look which always bears (like a wounded bird) tenderness—from Che’s last poem, written to his wife, Aleida, shortly before his death Before he was “Comandante Segundo,” the raving and homicidal (also: suicidal, but all violence against others flows from a rerouting of the subterranean channels of … Read more
1. “We Left the U.S. We Chose Chile.” In Chile, the settler-colonialist project of extermination and subjugation (a project driven from its beginning by a “native” oligarchy in a mistrustful and protean alliance with multinational capital) has always depended upon the sizable vanguard presence of colorful psychopaths, questing gringo monadological personalities, Melvillean isolates hurtling with … Read more
Roxane Beth Johnson’s first book of poetry, Jubilee, won the Philip Levine Award for Poetry and was published by Anhinga Press. In awarding the prize, Levine commented: “These luminous poems depict a world I never knew—or knew as a child and since forgot—and they do so with the authority of a totally mature voice. The … Read more
People who speak Spanish all have outside jobs, my daughter announces as the Mow ‘n Blow crew descend from a truck to ravish our lawn. I read her a book about dark children dancing, playing drums with wrinkled elders, eating fried plantains. Bored, she grabs Dr. Seuss. I’m not Latin Mommy. I’m light pink like … Read more
One night in bed you asked me who was my favourite painter. I hesitated, searching for the least knowing, most truthful answer. Caravaggio. My own reply surprised me. There are nobler painters and painters of greater breadth of vision. There are painters I admire more and who are more admirable. But there is none, so it seems—for the answer came unpremeditated—to whom I feel closer.