Prose, Poetry, and Art since 1956
I read an advanced copy of Ben Kline’s It Was Never Supposed to Be mere days after the 2024 presidential election was called. Meanwhile, pundits and journalists were stumbling over themselves to analyze results they found baffling, and I couldn’t help but feel that Kline’s work had already predicted its outcome. It Was Never Supposed to Be is a poetry collection, but it reads more…
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
Untitled I After Phil Kaye’s “Canyon” I lost contact with my obaachanfor a while. My tongue got tangledfrom gibberish versions of overhearingmom’s phone calls with her sisters and theEnglish alphabet as the sonics of kanjislipped slowly out of me, left mespeaking in haiku. I begged momto reteach me her first language but was pushedback into a white classroom with Odysseusand vocabulary lessons while the school’sspeech…
Benjamin Kessler’s novella The Pinnacle is set in a near-future version of New York City that feels uncomfortably close to our present moment. In it, our unnamed narrator spends weeklong shifts in The Pinnacle, the world’s tallest building—though the purpose of the building, and even its construction, remain unclear. Is it an engineering marvel or the world’s largest Ponzi scheme? Behind the building is the…
forever which means we are the ghostsI always knew we were.What haunts me is that I am certainthat everything that has ever happenedthat everything that will ever happenis happening right now. When I order a drink, I am being named.When you slip me your number, I am carrying your ashesin my purse through the streets of Rome.To preserve the body of an animal you lovefirst…