If you find that you are the type of person who is constantly at war with these two alternating states of self—where obligations can be ditched at a moment’s notice, or begrudgingly followed through—then you will feel right at home in the world of “Imaginary Museums” by Nicolette Polek.
My mother wanted things.
The aging bad boy of French letters’ latest outing exhausts nearly half its word count rehashing tired material. Then, when an antidepressant finally renders his narrator impotent, it picks up.
The wind pulls a crystal from my eye
The section for cash held a Trojan condom, but when his wife came to claim the contents of her dead husband’s pants, she said he’d had a vasectomy.
radical tenderness.
Before you go to school for the first time, you learn how to talk nice.
Grafton Tanner conjures the ghosts in our devices and invites us to join their chatroom. You’ll leave haunted.
The strongest brown body that I know shrinks in public
What is striking about Lerner’s third novel is the way it implicates itself, its forms—literature, prose, poetry—in the collapse of public discourse, and the proliferation of “man-children.”
Dave was a pathological flake, and after three years of dating, I still wasn’t used to his absolute surprise, confusion, and disappointment.
Burke lurks in the far corner of my bedroom when the lights are out and I’m in bed, wedged between my IKEA pillows.
I can’t pinpoint the moment I met Lidudumalingani. Throughout my time in Cape Town I encountered him at film festivals, talks on creativity, live music events, book gatherings and around the dinner tables of mutual friends.
I guzzled down my twenties
black hands/pure gold/interstellar bodies
would expose intoxicants under mama’s pulsing scales
Open the pages of King Arthur, though, and it’s apparent that we’re very far away from New York. We’re in Camelot.
I am not bereft, just panting
Recklessness looks a lot like bravery.
There are two kinds of people in the Persian community: Those that kiss you on the cheek twice, and those that you kiss you on the cheek three times.
