There’s a sense of the fantastic in “Performance,” by Mario Loprete. The oil painting is at once intensely real—from the delicate hairs on the shin to the exposed arch of the foot—and strikingly impossible. We’re left to imagine the body out of frame, its necessary weight and seeming weightlessness, the invisible risk, the assumption of gesture—perhaps hands outstretched in the sky. The painting forces us to consider what is and is not concrete: what can we depend on and where do our bodies fail?
On Tuesday I cleaned my apartment and watched my hair spin around in the clear canister at the top of my stick vacuum’s neck. Then I opened its full, gray mouth into the trash. On Wednesday the regular dirty spots were still clean, and I wanted to feel spotless again, so I tied a rag […]
Antigone: We begin in the dark and birth is the death of us Ismene: Who said that Antigone: HegelIsmene: Sounds more like Beckett Antigone: He was paraphrasing Hegel Ismene: I don’t think so –Ann Carson, Antigonick I once heard a saying that goes, your mother gives birth to you twice–first when you’re born and again […]
with a line by Jane Kenyon Sky of new snow open like eternity. Numinous, benign. All day wind moves the day along. January still blank as if unbegun. I’ve come to face it— I have to live and go on living. With the knowledge oblivion excludes me, apart from brief, fathomless sleep. Unshakable quiet I am told is peace. For you, I count the blessings which […]
Our current issue features fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and artwork from: Mario Loprete, Lesley Jenike, Katherine Plumhoff, Leila Chatti, Adam Gellings, & CD Eskilson.
What struck me first were the ways of exiting — via bird, via memory, via magic. Brent Ameneyro’s speakers are all knowing and all nostalgia. Producing not the sheen of romantic recall but the cleverness of reconstruction. In Ameneyro’s debut, A Face Out of Clay, there is no questioning, but lingering visitations. Portraits of loved […]
The particular landscape of Jessi Jezewska Stevens’ first collection, Ghost Pains, recalls echoes of the “New Aesthetic,” a term coined back in 2012 to describe the leakage of the digital realm into the physical world. Characters point their phones at the sky, “as if to image-search the constellations,” travel by way of reading reviews on […]
