Books
An Alternative Encyclopedia of Birds Categorized by Poop, Art History, and More
The earliest photograph of a living bird may be one taken by William Henry Fox Talbot in the early 1840s.
Books
Books
Shopping for the Afterlife in China
Chanel shoes, McDonald's french fries, iPhones, cognac, lacy lingerie, and machine guns are just a few of the consumer goods you can purchase for the dead in China.
Books
Reader’s Diary: Frank Lima's ‘Incidents of Travel in Poetry’
“There are several Puerto / Ricans on the avenue today, which / makes it beautiful and warm,” wrote Frank O’Hara in “A Step Away from Them.” It was 1956, the day after Jackson Pollock’s funeral.
Books
Foreign Sounds or Sounds Foreign
Brandon Som’s first book of poems, The Tribute Horse, won the 2012 Nightboat Poetry Prize.
Books
The Poetics of Embodiment: Elaine Kahn's 'Women in Public'
The poems in Elaine Kahn’s Women in Public are highly self-aware. They’re porous, riven with gaps and fragmentation; at the same time, they’re unquestionably "lyrical" in their concision and fluidity
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A Graphic Novel Chronicles Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Years
Woody Guthrie was responding to the hardships of the Great Depression, but he may as well have been singing about now.
Books
Reader’s Diary: ‘The Brexit Crisis’
The presses roll fast when there are no presses to roll.
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America’s Philosopher Poet
The Swimmer is John Koethe’s tenth book of poetry. For many years, he was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee until he retired in 2010.
Books
Cosmic Wind: Yoshimasu Gozo’s 'Alice Iris Red Horse'
In 2003 I received an invitation to attend a reading by the poet Yoshimasu Gozo, someone I had never heard of. I asked around, and was told that Gozo was an avant-garde poet who read in a bygone oracular style.
Books
Reader’s Diary: Darryl Pinckney's ‘Black Deutschland’
This is not so much a second novel as a mature reimagining of what a youthful first novel might have been.
Books
The Deceptively Cheerful Stripes of Deadly Fumigation Tents
You'd think that fun lies with their walls of colorful stripes, but inside the bright tents is the deadly gas of sulfuryl fluoride, quietly building up to eliminate nesting drywood termites.
Interview
Retracing a Lifetime of Urban Activism Through Jane Jacob's Last Interview
"The kind of planning for a city that would really work would be a sort of informed, intelligent improvisation, which is what most of our planning in life is in any case," said Jane Jacobs in a 1962 interview with Mademoiselle, conducted just after the 1961 publication of her influential The Death a