Tag: #ownvoices
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Cowboys of California: A Cowboy to Remember
I have never been fond of Stetson-wearing, harness-toting, cowboy covers. I’m not a country girl. I don’t do the boondocks, I do cities. (Dark allies, ritzy penthouses, neighborhood bungalows, walk-ups and elevator buildings and anonymous crowds of people—those are my spaces.) I also don’t do amnesia, because it just isn’t my trope. Give me long-simmering […]
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Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know
I read Samira Ahmed’s Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know over August, which happens to be the very month in which it’s set, in Paris, when all the OTHER French people have gotten out of Dodge for wherever it is one goes in France in the summer. (I wouldn’t know: my family goes to Wisconsin.) […]
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The Sealey Challenge: Matters of the Sea – Cosas del Mar
I began this 2020 Sealey Challenge with Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s bleak, fierce borderlands poetry, The Verging Cities, and I end with Richard Blanco’s hopeful, tender Matters of the Sea / Cosas del Mar. My edition, small and beautifully printed, the sea swirling in silver or maybe just another shade of purple on its cover, includes Ruth […]
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The Sealey Challenge: Ordinary Beast
Nicole Sealey is the Sealey Challenge’s namesake and creator, and today I read her work: Ordinary Beast, which might describe us ordinary human beasts, but is no ordinary book. Ordinary Beast is longer than Sealey’s chapbook, The Animal After Whom Other Animals are Named, incorporating some of the same poems. Much like The Animal, Ordinary […]
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The Sealey Challenge: I Am Loved
This is a long day in a long week, and so I picked something different: I Am Loved, a collection of Nikki Giovanni’s poetry coupled with Ashley Bryan’s lush art. Nikki Giovanni sings in her poetry, writing celebrations of love and life and family and friends in the midst of horror. (In Love Poems, that […]
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The Sealey Challenge: Night Animals
Yusef Komunyakaa’s Night Animals, with its often-jarring art by surrealist Rachel Bliss, is strange and elegant and sometimes frightful, an exploration of the beasts of the darkness, for good and for ill, fantastical and earthly. Komunyakaa balances a careful mixture of naturalistic poetry, built around explorations of very real beasts of our world (including humans), […]
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The Sealey Challenge: A Theory of Birds
Birds are everywhere in Zaina Alsous’ A Theory of Birds: live birds, dead birds, birds as metaphor and myth and presence, birds in lost homelands, lost birds in the pages of books and the halls of natural history museums. The birds tangle and flow alongside the pervasive, violent, ever-violating colonialism, in the U.S. and in […]
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The Sealey Challenge: Thrall
It was the cover that drew me, first, to Natasha Trethewey’s Thrall: detail of a casta painting, one of the De español e india, mestiza ones, paintings everyone with a background in colonial Spanish America knows in a hundred different types. Thrall is exquisite, and elegant. Trethewey reaches back into the past to interrogate constructions […]
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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 […]
Essentially a Nerd 