Tag: Chicago
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life, quilted: Bisa Butler’s Portraits at the Art Institute of Chicago
The women in my mother’s family tie off their quilts. I’m not entirely sure where it came from, though I will confess I’ve wondered if we’re tying off and tying elfknots into our own work (rather than our hair: mine is too straight to elfknot anyway) as a good-luck charm, or maybe a ward. (It’s […]
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The Sealey Challenge: Readings in World Literature
Srikanth Reddy’s Readings in World Literature is a strange and delightful cycle of prose poetry, or perhaps it’s poetic essays: I’m not really the expert on that. Reddy, in his acknowledgements, calls Readings “this poem,” so I think I’ll say that it is one poem, or one poem cycle, broken into thirty-three parts. Each is […]
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The Sealey Challenge: I Have Never Been Able to Sing
Ugly Duckling Presse calls it “an experiment in creating autobiography’s negative.” It shares something with never-have-I-ever, except without alcohol (or counting). But, most of all, Alexis Almeida’s I Have Never Been Able to Sing starts with never-have-I-evers and moves into telling the story of Almeida herself. Every poem but one starts with “I have never” […]
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The Sealey Challenge: Milwaukee Avenue
For three years now, Kevin Coval and Langston Allston’s collaboration Milwaukee Avenue has sat near me, daring me to unfold it and read its accordion pleats, covered in print and image, telling the story of one street, sure, but also of Chicago. Today, this fifth day of the Sealey Challenge 2021, was the day. Milwaukee […]
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Ghost Variations
Classical music is a world of love and death, often tangled together. In that world of love and death and passion, Robert and Clara Wieck Schumann and Johannes Brahms are, most likely, not the only love triangle to triangulate, but they are definitely one of the more intense. Tragic, passionate, dark: there are surely a […]
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Chicago Humanities Festival’s Chicago Neighborhood Check-in: Arts and Neighborhood Development
I covered the Chicago Humanities Festival’s Neighborhood Check-In: Arts and Urban Development panel for Third Coast Review, and now that my review has made it into print, I get to talk about it a bit here too. Beforehand I assumed that this panel, like What’s Next: Wealth, Property, and Inequality and Art in the Moment, […]
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Chicago Humanities Festival’s What’s Next
I covered the Chicago Humanities Festival’s What’s Next: Wealth, Property, and Inequality for Third Coast Review, distilling something like ten pages of notes (all typed frantically on my phone—Google makes a good device or it would have melted) into this review, which I hope comes close to doing that remarkable panel justice. I’m not going […]
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The Sealey Challenge: Wild Hundreds
Nate Marshall’s Wild Hundreds is a South Side song, poetry that could, I think, come only out of our side of Chicago. It reaches back to Chicago’s past—and famed writers of bygone days, who’ve given us nicknames and notoriety—while telling an inherently contemporary (and timeless) tale of the Wild Hundreds, Roseland and its environs. Wild […]
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independent vs. self-interested and Rahm’s new book
I spend a lot of time, at my day job and then randomly throughout my days, harping on the importance of reading critically. We’re going to consume a hell of a lot of information, often whether we want to or not, and the best thing we can do (beyond seeking out reputable sources) is to […]
Essentially a Nerd 