This Body Is a Gift: Natalie Diaz

The award-winning poet on her new book, Postcolonial Love Poem

To celebrate this achievement, we're reprinting this interview with the author, originally posted in April 2020. Native Americans account for just 0.8 percent of the population of the United States. Yet according to four decades’ worth of data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, almost 2 percent of ...
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This Body Is a Gift: Natalie Diaz

The Dharma of Fashion

If you crave fashion, make friends with your desire

It is said that on the eve of his enlightenment, the Buddha sat beneath a tree and was assailed by the demon Mara. Mara is literally “Death,” the personification of temptation and distraction. Using seductive images and ultimately doubt, Mara challenged the Buddha, distracting him from his goal of enlightenment. ...
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The Dharma of Fashion

A Promiscuous Formalist

An Interview With Brian Teare

Richard Sharp [RS]: In “Clear Water Renga” you place each stanza on the page to create what looks like a river flowing downstream. How do you decide on forming your work and how does it impact the message specific to that poem overall? Brian Teare [BT]: I’m a promiscuous formalist. Promiscuous ...
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A Promiscuous Formalist

The Strangeness and Miracle of Being

An Interview With Ilya Kominsky

The following interview with Ilya Kominsky, a 2020 finalist in poetry, is part of a series of NBCC interviews conducted by New School creative writing students. In his book Deaf Republic, award-winning poet Ilya Kaminsky explores political disorder in a community where the people are united in a time of tragedy, ...
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The Strangeness and Miracle of Being

Celebrating the “Female Byron”: An Interview With Lucasta Miller

The National Book Critics Circle finalist on her biography, L.E.L.

Lucasta Miller, author of The Bronte Myth, returns to the world of 19th century female authors with L.E.L., an extensively researched recasting of the life and career of Letitia Elizabeth Landon. Long ignored and dismissed by critics, recently unearthed information has shed light on Landon’s personal life and by extension offered a new perspective ...
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Celebrating the “Female Byron”: An Interview With Lucasta Miller

On The Hatred of Literature

Liberalism is about life and everything it contains

When I was in college, at the end of the last century, the prevailing school of literary interpretation was called “New Historicism.” The foundational assumption of this approach was that artworks were primarily of value insofar as they could offer us insight into the context and conditions of their historical ...
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On The Hatred of Literature

When the Networks Prescribed a Dose of Reality for Ailing Soap Operas

How AIDS and Social Issues Reinvigorated Soaps in the 1990’s

In this excerpt, Levine looks at how “the soaps”, challenged by flagging ratings in the 1990s, embraced the social issues of their day. --- Reality versus Fantasy As soap ratings initiated their slow decline by the later 1980s, the programs began to explore new developments in storytelling, shifting the boundaries of soap opera ...
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When the Networks Prescribed a Dose of Reality for Ailing Soap Operas

“Our War Would Be With a Virus”

The New School poet’s latest collection retraces the losses of the AIDS crisis

From 13th Balloon What might anyone have made of you and me as babies born into the mess and ferment of the late 1960s Working-class babies born to parents who themselves were babies during World War II Were they worried already about Vietnam         or about some other monstrous hand that would grab us from our cribs by our feet and throw us into the war that ...
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“Our War Would Be With a Virus”

Jerome Robbins, Montgomery Clift, and the Origins of “West Side Story”

How a hit Broadway musical was born in New York’s post-war bohemia

We print this excerpt from Julia L. Foulkes, A Place for Us: “West Side Story” and New York (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016) in celebration of the new Broadway production of West Side Story that opened at The Broadway Theater on February 20, 2020. The choreographer Jerome Robbins and the actor Montgomery ...
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Jerome Robbins, Montgomery Clift, and the Origins of “West Side Story”

Lao-tzu, Plato, and Parasite

What’s up with that Scholar’s Stone?

Parasite depicts the struggling Kim family, living in a semi-basement apartment in Seoul, desperately seeking sources of income to afford the very basics to sustain their humble lives. In a portentous scene early in the film, the older child of the family, Ki-Woo, is visited by his wealthy college friend, Min, ...
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Lao-tzu, Plato, and Parasite

Mnemonics of (Re)Used Clothes

Sustainable fashion requires grappling with the relationships and memories clothing represents

Looking inside my wardrobe, I see a pile of clothes, dresses on hangers, shawls in boxes, and my favorite tote bags. If only they could speak, they would probably tell stories about my past experiences. I am not a collector, nor so attached to artifacts that I must keep them ...
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Mnemonics of (Re)Used Clothes