Literature Archives - Page 10 of 13

Literature

How to Keep Your Soul Intact

A poetry series documents ten weeks under COVID-19

August 25, 2020 • by Val Vinokur

Over ten weeks spanning June, July, and August 2020, Val Vinokur composed a cycle of poems documenting life during the COVID-19 pandemic and published weekly at Public Seminar. Titled "The Big Cats,” the resulting series serves as a poetic diary, a kind of "Waste Land” with hyperlinks, responding to the ...

Literature

The Big Cats, Part X

On melting ice, online shopping, and dads with leaf-blowers

August 4, 2020 • by Val Vinokur

Behind the thick blue smudge there is a wall / of feds in camouflage. ...

Literature

Re-reading C. P. Snow

What the mid-century novelist and man of letters understood about being human in an uncertain world

July 30, 2020 • by Anthony Grafton

Rather like the legendary couple of whom someone, struggling to understand their mutual attraction, cracked, “Well, they are both carbon-based life forms,” these books seem pretty disparate. But all of them help me find calm at night, particularly now, when the shadows gather and the future looks even darker than ...

Literature

The Big Cats, Part IX

On the heat and halitosis of the State

July 28, 2020 • by Val Vinokur

This palpative uncommonwealth, a thing held / or pulled apart like a tightrope or meat off the bone....

Literature

Fifteen Years

July 23, 2020 • by Ariel Vidal

You haven’t tried.To know me.Only try to control me.You think it’s my job to cater to you? I was seven,Or around that age,When you two finally separated.I was relieved. You never deserved her.And she may not be thereAs much as I need her,But even then you haven’t earned her love.So why would ...

Literature

The Big Cats, Part VIII

On the sharp edge of fragility

July 21, 2020 • by Val Vinokur

Follow your own feet uphill, fix / your gaze on the undeliverable missives / flying back to their return address...

Literature

The Big Cats, Part VII

On the elements of crisis: oxygen, hydrogen, chlorine

July 14, 2020 • by Val Vinokur

The tigers sing: We never ate your parents. So what if we ate your parents. They were no angels and neither are you....

Literature

The Big Cats, Part VI

On the rough, indifferent tongue of the truth

July 7, 2020 • by Val Vinokur

Come and see the tigers lick us with their rough / indifferent tongues as our wax darkens...

Literature

The Big Cats, Part V

On crime and punishment and missing out on parties

June 30, 2020 • by Val Vinokur

The virus is born and already dead, a script / for another life’s dis-ease. ...

Literature

The Big Cats, Part IV

On Joe Exotic and Bill Gates

June 23, 2020 • by Val Vinokur

Tiger catches / Joe Exotic by the toe. He won’t run, / let him go. My mother said Bill Gates / is going to pick the very last one....

Literature

The Goths & Other Stories

June 17, 2020 • by Sasha Kaoru Zamler-Carhart

I In the winter of 476 A.D. the Ostrogoths, hungry and exhausted from wandering for months through barren hills along the confines of the Byzantine Empire, wrote to Emperor Zeno in Constantinople requesting permission to enter the walled city of Epidaurum, and just kinda crash and charge their phones. “My ...