Essays
Now You See Me, Now You Don’t: Decentering Whiteness in Seattle
There was a talk going on about Black Lives Matters at the Seattle Center. For better or for worse, I suppose lately there is always a talk going on about…
Literature is not an Object: Toward an inter-“Activism”
“Leap and dance, ye living buildings—” —Shaker hymn I’m not writing this, and you’re not reading it. Because, how am I going to describe it, the beloved unspeakability, especially of what…
Conjuring Green with Natalie Diaz
This is the drill when it comes to poetry workshops: print out enough copies of your poem, read it to a room full of strangers, and engage in a sort…
All that’s left: the art of Teresa Margolles
Photo: Teresa Margolles, Lemas (Mottos), 2009. Fabric impregnated with blood gathered from the places where murders took place embroidered with gold threads / Intallation view: What Else Could We Talk…
This wave in the mind: Woolf in the middle of my life’s journey
The following essay won second place in the 2017 Geneva Writers’ Group Literary Awards for Nonfiction, judged by Nick Barlay. The house was full of excitement bursting and receding like…
Ode to mentality; or, Poetry needs weird subjectivity
I’m working for free. I’m not a cynic. —Alan Dugan …one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine. —Marianne Moore An Image for Readers “Does this poet…
#MotherLit: Barber, Mnookin, Parks, & Ross
Following up on the Motherhood issue (March-April 2017), Chloe García Roberts and Mia You asked four authors to reflect on the literature that become important to them after they became mothers. We’d love to…
Or, How I Learned to Keep Worrying: Collaborative Writing, Motherhood, and the Atom Bomb
In Inger Christensen’s long poem Alphabet, first published in Danish in 1981, the poet cooks potatoes. And atom bombs exist. While she stands in the kitchen peeling potatoes under the…
From the Editors: the Motherhood Issue
We’re trying to think back to the origins of A. Bradstreet: We remember that I was working in the Poetry Room at Harvard. That I came by to drop off…