“White male anxiety about an impending age where his place is not solidified is nothing new. We know this story too well, yet on screen white men go on killing, their violent delights our supposed entertainment.”
[Poetry] — Phillip Shabazz
“Someone/who loses himself for the damp word of promise/where smoke rolls upward from a Pall Mall.”
[Essay] Coming Out in Lockdown — Dominic Brown
“After more than a decade constructing this image, why come out now?”
[Poetry] — George Rawlins
“I stalk a weakening current, a mirror/to wandering, tracing faint verse/into sediment just/below whitewater.”
[Review] The Year in Books 2020 — James McLoughlin
“In need of some levity, I ran my finger along the spines on the shelf and, naturally, plucked out Heart of Darkness.”
[Essay] Dickens’s Spirits — James Riding
“These ghosts keep returning in Dickens’s writing not just because of their practical uses, but also out of necessity: they are an intrinsic component of his craft. Dickens knew all too well that a writer must be a bodysnatcher.”
[Fiction] Rare Old Primate — Brent Crane
“At the time of the heist, the lemur was thirty-two years old.”
[Essay] Boris the Katechon — Josh Mcloughlin
“Johnson, like the archetypal Pauline katechon, has been outmatched and overwhelmed by a crisis he has proved damningly incapable and incompetent to restrain, and which will further darken his already wretched political legacy.”
[Poetry] — Adam Houle
“You can’t tell / if the snow is fresh, a god-sent snow, falling / or if it’s just wind-lifted, old snow come again”
[Poetry] — Adam Tavel
“Carter gazes at a thousand shadow treasures / he’ll loot to catalog in haughty solitude / until the war, until his cancer comes.”
[Essay] Splendid Uselessness — Alexandre Leskanich
“At its best knowledge facilitates the emancipation of the human mind from narcissism, conformity, bigotry, intolerance, and hatred. All the more disturbing, then, is the grim spectacle that greets those engaged in its manufacture.”
[Fiction] Chasing Your Tail — Mersiha Bruncevic
“It began with him following me. Then, I decided to follow him instead. Street after street. Bridge after bridge.”
[Fiction] Train — Ali Ackland-Snow
“Eight hours in, the fights begin to break out.”
[Poetry] — Kathryn de Leon
“I watched moving clouds/soften the sky with holiness/then pass their pure hands over me,/blessing me and healing /the sadness of my young life”
[Review] Oeuvre as Palimpsest: Holy Roman’s ‘Let Manchester Shake’ — Josh Mcloughlin
“Bowers’s is an ongoing, concerted project, anchored in the basic technique of exploring ideas by rewriting over songs and themes but retaining traces and echoes.”
[Essay] To You — Christopher Impiglia
“A long time, one hundred years. A long time too since this first English edition, bought by my father at auction, was published: a half-century. Fifty years of annotations illuminating it, including his and my own.”
[Essay] ‘In early August among the spruce’: Reading Schuyler’s Memoirs on Great Spruce Head Island — Jane Hertenstein
“Every day on Great Spruce Head Island was like waking up inside a Porter painting; around every corner and curve was an image from Fairfield’s raisonné or Schuyler’s poems.”
[Essay] A Walking Skeleton: Illusions of Voice — Michael Sutton
“What is human consciousness if not the internal voice, the connotations and denotations of language, voices diseased and voices subsumed, god voices, voices of creation, from brain to page to screen to brain to page.”
New Critique 