Curator’s Corner: National Museum of African American History and Culture
By Visual Art Issue 106
This isn’t about objects, really. It’s about narratives of humanity, where objects are merely tropes for human experiences.
Read MoreHalf-Wishes of the Cockatrice
By Poetry Issue 106
Cal Freeman on the mythological cockatrice, which kills with a glance.
Read MoreAn Indelible Season: NYC, 2020
By Photo Essay Issue 106
Photographing helped me see the small light in this epic darkness, to find a conscientious perspective.
Read MoreA Spider, an Arab, and a Muslim Walk into a Cave
By Essay Issue 106
In Ibn Arabi, a totality of faiths were convened. His heart contained within it pastures for deer, monasteries for monks, a temple for idols, a Kaaba around which to parade, tablets for a Torah, and a Quran, as he said in one of his famous verses: “I follow the religion of love wherever its caravans go.”
Read MoreThe Film The History of Our Inner Lives
By Poetry Issue 106
This is how the movie ends in movies—
The fade, the retreat, image dissolving
into the bath that bore it.
Crossed
By Essay Issue 106
I was fine with the ceramic statues of Mary, flaming heart jumping out of her chest. I liked the bright blue robe, gold stars, and shell-like halo of the Virgin of Guadalupe. But the big wooden crucifixes, that crown of thorns digging into Jesus’s brown locks, skinny white arms yanked above so that he’s pitched forward—they spook me the way Dracula spooks me.
Read MoreWakening
By Poetry Issue 106
Prayer is silence, / spirit-bones and soul-blood fluctuant as breath.
Read MoreA Devotional Temperament: A Conversation with Garth Greenwell
By Interview Issue 106
One of the extraordinary accomplishments of the Confessions is to find a syntax that doesn’t deny impasse or dilemma, but that also doesn’t allow impasse or dilemma to become stagnant.
Read MorePops
By Poetry Issue 106
I remember you in your final atonement, how calm you were.
Though you couldn’t tell me, you understood the names hidden in the dusk.
The Mule
By Issue 106
Such is the mule, muscled with self-knowledge,
wiser than Aristotle.