The dense and layered sociocultural fabric of West Oakland – a fascinating mix of the sub/urban, industrial, and historic – has faded from public recollection yet retains a character that persists despite the dispossession the neighborhood has endured for decades.
Anna T. reads the Dictionary of the Queer International and tells us how it moves her.
A chance meeting in a park unearthed a treasure trove of expressive photographs documenting New York in the ’80s.
The new year has only increased the intensity of our global instability. What responsibility do we have to tend to the needs of those who make us feel unsafe?
Wandering the streets of San Francisco, browsing the city’s bookshelves, a writer reflects on twenty years of literary and artistic influence, navigating an increasingly unfamiliar landscape in New York City.
Trained to be producers and consumers in a marketplace of literature, most writers don’t know how to be citizens of a polity. In the concluding essay of the Polity of Literature series the editor, Matthew Stadler, proposes an experiment to help us: The GOAT PoL (The Geopolitical Open Atlas of The Polity of Literature).
Residents of the San Mateo and Chícharo neighborhoods in Santurce, Puerto Rico recall gallitos, a long forgotten neighborhood game in which opponents tie strings to the hard seeds of the algarroba fruit and take turns smashing each other’s gallito.
After years of disordered eating, I learned to listen quietly to real markers of hunger and realized, quite startlingly, that I am always hungry.
Kim TallBear writes an update on her post-Covid palate for food, drink, sex, and conversation, and opens her tattered copy of Simon(e)’s book for some inspired remote discourse.
In the midst of a lockdown, Simon(e) van Saarloos questions their relationship to time, to dreams, to public space, and to the sexuality of voles.
Residents of the San Antón neighborhood in Carolina, Puerto Rico create oracles with botanical inks on behalf of loved ones who introduced them to the world of plants.
In her response to Simon(e) van Saarloos, Kim TallBear discusses finding her polyamorous community, cross-border lovers, and navigating multiple relationships in a lockdown.