The buds are insistent that the roots' energy is expressed despite the trunk’s non-existence, and there is little evidence I have tried to live a single moment with such vigor.

The mother-writer is becoming its own category, one recognizable for its ambivalence and disclosure not only of the difficulties of creating something, but watching your creation live outside your control.

These are in many ways Marxist novels, or at least grounded in Marxist critiques of what the wage and bourgeois society do to the human soul. Labor and land are decisive forces on these characters. They squat in inherited apartments or drift on boats.

Right when the building is reduced to rubble, I’m tying my shoes. I miss the best part. What a waste of waste.

Maksymchuk’s words accrue a mountain of humanity in the ends of inhumanity. Ascend it; peer over language’s walls. Can her poetics actually cross them all?

Frazier wants to slow these moments of change down, hold them fast, and provide them with the level of reflection given to art in prestigious spaces like MoMA’s galleries. The exhibit opens with her instruction that we understand her works as “monuments for workers’ thoughts.”

Can an object—in the form of language—seeping out of these cracks elucidate some semblance of a truth?

Kinsky maintains that film is a contact sport: not simply fingertips feeding celluloid through a projector (though this is detailed often and affectionately), but also eyes carrying images like palmfuls of water

This never really happens, but I wanted it to be a book that anybody could read, more or less, because I got so many ideas for stories from people I worked with—when I worked on farms or in light construction, or growing up working at a pizza place. I always write and read in the morning, and when I worked on the farms or in construction, I would try to do a little bit before work since I knew the day was going to be tiring.

J & C & I peel our greens

into trash bags a little fast

our tempos try to forget

debt’s discipline trash bags

of greens pile against the fence

I finished The Time of Cherries on a severely delayed Amtrak train, at the very moment when I felt something akin to Roig’s “chaos of hopelessness.” The summer was off-kilter, with an endless deluge of “unprecedented events” playing out on newsfeeds and televisions. Flashes of abnormality, lighting up phones, tickering across widescreens, punctuated the dullness of long, excruciatingly hot days.

It is left unclear, intentionally, where the translation of imagination ends and the translation of language begins. Instead, from the Portuguese novel, we learn that the English narrator is unreliable only in the sense that she is a writer, tasked with the impossible undertaking that is replicating experience.

What had stirred Miéville’s return to fiction after more than a decade? What would this collaboration look like? Did this make Reeves a comrade? 

We understand, through the haze of her so extremely un-Cusk-like uncertainty, exactly why she turns to both gender and visuality in the two novels she’s written since. She is looking for a way out.

Officially, what happened in the story hadn’t happened and the story didn’t exist. It had never been compiled and was never to be uttered outside official hearings. In this matter, secrecy was of paramount importance: somebody would be made to take responsibility regardless of what anybody thought about stories.

The haunting is never settled. It moves in every direction, changing shape, folding inwards, transforming the living as it does the dead. All of us: diaspora of the ___.

Celan pushes what is light and human in his work into the background, to bring tragedy to the fore. Tawada does the opposite, pushing tragedy into the background to foreground what is light and human. Paul Celan and The Trans-Tibetan Angel is where they meet.

I was turning the lichen in the cemetery into a meal, I was delicately harvesting the lichen that covers his mother’s gravestone and I was going to make a salad with it.

She scrutinizes her mother’s every move, as we watch her notice her mother’s failings for the first time.

Like any good parent, Zambra wants to keep some kind of record to ward off forgetting.