Essays
Vision as palimpsest: on Johannes Göransson’s translations of Ann Jäderlund
Translations emit. They pull us in and push at us at once. Emit, that curious word: it’s time spelt backward. Translation makes time go backward. Translation’s process … helps me…
Despotism is all around us: the warnings of Montesquieu
It is commonplace for citizens of liberal, democratic nations to believe that despotism is foreign to their own experiences. Their political constitutions display in some form or other a separation…
Noli me tangere
In 1939, as London braced itself for the bombs, the National Gallery’s paintings were moved to the dining room of Penrhyn Castle, North Wales. It wasn’t necessarily safer. Martin Davies,…
Shields: A poem founds the world it finds
Editor’s note: The following essay is excerpted from Of Silence and Song, a book of essays, fragments, and poems forthcoming from Milkweed Editions (December 2017). Reading Hesiod on the shuttle bus to the…
Love song por La Condesa
On the night of September 19, 2017, I find a small map online of the oval park in front of my father’s house with its surrounding streets that extend out…
The authority to say anything at all
When I was a Catholic teenager, I was an altar server and reader at my parish church. Our parish priest was forward-thinking. At one Easter Vigil Mass, I played the…
Letter from Issue 50 guest editor Ricco Siasoco
The collective “I” in Issue 50 of The Critical Flame is one of protest, of comedy, and, hopefully, of the zeitgeist. As the guest editor for this issue, I’ve attempted…
A New Monument
Emancipation Park in Charlottesville, VA was, until recently, named Lee Park. In 1917, Paul Goodloe McIntire donated the land for the park, as well as the 26-foot monument of Robert…
Metropolitan is Still There
You used to go to Metropolitan alone. You were 21 and it was the closest gay bar to where you lived in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. It was a good place if…