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Treatise: Toward a Theory of Silence in Modernist American Poetry Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-04-07 Andrew Williamson
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After Reading a Book of Unexpected Metaphors Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-04-05 Stanley Moss
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Requiem for Margie, a dog I loved without conflict Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-04-05 Stanley Moss
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Audubon Circle Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-03-03 Moldaw C.
Three fixed points triangulate my Circle:this room, its desk, bed, table and couch;two and a half, three, blocks west: a caféwhere daily I fill my thermos; the other sideof the trolley tracks, a neighborhood market,runt of a national conglomerate’s litter.One crooked tangent leads off to the gym;another, up Park Drive to the Fine Arts.
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Agatha, or Open Water: A Nantucket Obituary Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-03-03 Buchanan B.
Let it take shape as it will, this account of Agatha that ends on Nantucket, let this alternate obituary, not what you’ll read in the newspaper, take shape from what little I know about her, resolute scientist with hidden terrors, my painting Muse for a time, unbeknownst to her, in college, Agatha from northern New Jersey wealth—But Nantucket … she came full circle to it, the very name bearing to her
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Hitting Billy: Mediated Interiority in Billy Budd Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-03-01 Yoshiaki Furui
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The Curator as Oracle: A Guide to The Harlem Gallery Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-02-26 Schreiber J.
Writers and scholars may feel more potential solace in speaking about art that’s clearly invested in racial uplift than they do in unpacking a kind of existential conundrum that demands a great deal more of its viewer and denies the relief of a comforting directive.
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Crime in a Box Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-02-26 Melnyczuk A.
They came in a box. Reeves was standing at the window waiting for Diva’s call when he saw the white van pull up in front of the house. He watched as the young man, wearing gray pants and a short-sleeved white shirt, walked briskly up the brick path carrying a hefty package the size of a child’s coffin which he held out in front of him like a tray laden with heavy china and thick silver. Stepping away
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With One Eye Closed Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-02-25 Harrison J.
The artist closes one eye to take the measure of the world, the marksman to take aim,though why, last night, drifting on the lake in a canoe, I closed one of mineI can’t say—but when I did, the moon’s confused reflection wavering beside the boatcame into focus as a single line of luminous script writing itself on the blackglossy surface of the lake in a sinuous calligraphy I couldn’t readbut didn’t
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873 Beacon Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-02-25 Moldaw C.
In my narrow tub, I thought I heardyou sigh the way you do when you come inas I’m taking a long hot bath at home,a non-sequitur sigh, contented, spent.But why spent, why contented, you want meto wonder, want me to ask, and I oblige,sometimes lifting myself out of the waterbefore it’s cooled, to dry off as we talk.Why this lonely exile, the air exhaleson its own, to ask me in a huff of steam.Be sure
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Dragonfly Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-02-25 Harrison J.
On my afternoon walk, it caught my eye,a dragonfly trapped on the millpond, wingsheld by the surface tension, as I was heldby its frantic struggle, a dark disturbanceat the center of bright expanding rings …until it stopped, and the widening circlesgradually gave way to a reflectionof sky and clouds so radiant my eyetook its focus off the dragonfly.
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Some Settling May Occur Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-02-25 Harrison J.
This product is sold by weight, not volumeand some settling may have occurredduring shipping and handling.
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Windrows Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-02-09 Sandler M.
1.Closed, the library has displayed its old bookson long tables, some on end, others stacked
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“On Forsakenness” Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-02-02 Kertai C.
For Szilárd BorbélyForsakenness follows from redemption,that is, you will rot all at once.You are your own certitude,a corpse’s mouth filled with pearls,you say it will be better soon,the flowers, the spring will come,but you know you are here no longer,you remain only as mythrown-away genuine pearl.That is the problem and duty,to rot all at once, in good time.You are the trampled-downshout of the
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“Lake Balaton” Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-02-02 Kertai C.
It’s possible that everything falls apart,yet until now, the lush panorama has offered some kind of repose.Don’t try to rest in me—says the sailboat alone in the middle of the lake—rest assured, rather, that anything, anytime, can fall apart.
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“A Gesture and a Pose”: Hawthorne, Eliot, and the Aesthetics of Detachment Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-01-20 Gee S.
It is a well-known fact that T.S. Eliot, for all his Anglophilia, was throughout his career deeply indebted to American writers and American thought. His biographer, Lyndall Gordon, writes of being “struck by the persistence of American traditions in Eliot.”11 Ronald Schuchard has called attention to “the intellectual baggage that [Eliot] brought to England from America,” while lamenting the fact that
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February Fox Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-01-20 Smith D.
Awake at dawn I stand before iced glass.A flap of newspaper the night’s left limpclings to a pine sapling, even big wordsbled out like poor women stabbed or shotin Memphis, where TV hurls at us nowthe awful, ordinary assaults we escape.Soon, I’ll eat, dress, start my car for work.
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Now That I Am Dead Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-01-20 Smith D.
Now that I am dead under the azaleascolorful as a woman’s wedding gown,below dirt just heaped, what good is love?I made such noise about feeling I waslonely, misery-ridden, badly done-to,I made myself sick and turned to wordstwisted into little songs I liked to hum.Women in glasses often asked for more,crossing their legs, watching the windows.Whatever they said, they said love iswhy a man wants a
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Man Swimming in Home-Dug Pool Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-01-20 Smith D.
At bottom the world isn’t a joke.Robert Frost
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A Little Afternoon Music Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-01-18 Moss S.
In cement playgrounds there are8-year-olds who will be mothers and fathers,grandmothers and grandfathers(years equal to six, seven or eight dog lives).I see grandmothers and grandfathers in swingsand slides, some jumping rope.In a tree playhouse, three canes, candy,crutches, walkers with wheels and brakes.
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Corrigendum to: Plessy v. Ferguson and the Dissenting Opinion in the Classroom Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-11-18 Diana Senechal
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Editing Yeats Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-10-09 Pritchard W.
McDonaldPeter, ed., The Poems of W. B. Yeats, Volume One. London and New York: Routledge, 1882–1889. 724 pages. ISBN 978-0-367-49560-2. Peter McDonald, ed., The Poems of W. B. Yeats, Volume Two. London and New York: Routledge, 1890–1898. 596 pages. ISBN 978-0-367-49762-0.
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The Fidelities of John Clare and Elizabeth Bishop Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-10-04 Mueller J.
“[If a] person or thing outlives its own beauty—as when a face believed ravishing for two years no longer seems so in the third, or a favorite vase one day ceases to delight, or a poem beloved in the decade when it is written becomes incomprehensible to those who read it later—then it is sometimes not just turned away from but turned upon, as though it has enacted a betrayal.”11 The error Elaine Scarry
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Pages 30–34, an excerpt from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-09-13 Nicole Sealey
Born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. and raised in Apopka, Florida, Nicole Sealey is the author of Ordinary Beast, finalist for the PEN Open Book and Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize.
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Notes on Contributors Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-09-13
David Bromwich is Sterling Professor of English at Yale University. His books include Hazlitt: the Mind of a Critic, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke, and How Words Make Things Happen.
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News Cycle Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-09-02 Dove R.
Follow the arrows, this way –but not too close! Wash your hands:the very air’s a terrorist. Usecommon sense – what’s commonanymore? No one should have toask for permission to breathe.Take a knee, take the fifth,go spread your second amendmentaround – just keep it off me.Everyone’s a bandit now. Stand back.Don’t touch. You’ll be saferight there, right where you belong:sheltering, alone.
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Mixed Feelings Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-08-20 Rainof R.
“Rather than ‘speaking about’ a culture outside your experience, the filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha suggests we ‘speak nearby.’ … I am only capable of ‘speaking nearby’ the Asian American condition, which is so involuted that I can’t stretch myself across it.” (103) Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning.
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Introduction Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-08-18 Ernest Suarez
This issue of Literary Imagination contains poetry by writers of color and essays concerning race by an array of critics. The issue was prompted by the moment in which we find ourselves politically—including protests associated with Black Lives Matter and the murders of so many Black people—and pedagogically: how to assess and teach aesthetically powerful literary works that address race in ways that
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“Black Artillery”: Herman Melville and the Unthinkability of White Mob Violence in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-08-14 Lenora Warren
On the morning of July 13, 1863, in New York City, a protest against the Federal Conscription Act devolved into five days of violence in which working-class whites targeted both local centers of Republican power and the city’s African American population. This protracted period of conflict has come to be known as the New York Draft Riots, or simply the Draft Riots. The Draft Riots aren’t precisely
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Plessy v. Ferguson and the Dissenting Opinion in the Classroom Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-08-03 Diana Senechal
Several times a year, as a high school teacher of English and civilization in Szolnok, Hungary, I take high school students into the text of a historic U.S. Supreme Court decision, including the dissenting opinions. Through such reading, students come to see that those who differ openly from the majority may influence future thought and policy, that an era is not entirely defined by its trends, and
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Isabel Wilkerson, Albion Tourgée, and the Problem of Caste in the United States Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-08-03 Robert S Levine
Race has long seemed to be at the center of the nation’s discontents, but Isabel Wilkerson argues otherwise. In her most recent book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020), she seeks to change the way we think about race and social hierarchy in the United States. White supremacy, she argues, is not simply about racism; it is the “visible cue” to something even more insidious: the existence of
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Undressing Tragedy’s Skeleton Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-08-03 Samet E.
I have just finished a letter to you, in which I tell you that I have sketched out the skeleton of another tragedy … You ask me what has moved me to this mental effort. My milliner’s bill, my dear; which, being £97 sterling, I feel extremely inclined to pay out of my own brains; for, though they received a very severe shock, and one of rather paralyzing effect, upon my being reminded that whatever
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Ellison’s Invisible Man and Faulkner’s Light in August: An Argument in Black and White Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-08-03 Mikics D.
In a letter to Albert Murray dated April 9, 1953, Ralph Ellison described meeting William Faulkner at Random House on the morning of the National Book Awards ceremony for Invisible Man (1952): Saxe [Commins, Faulkner’s editor] says, “Bill, I want you to meet Ralph Ellison. He’s one of our writers who’s won the National Book Award.”
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Ellison and the Visibility of Laughter Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-08-03 David Bromwich
The personal essay has always been understood as a domain for experiment and a test of imaginative virtuosity. If, however, you want to draw readers with a story more interesting than life, a novel is what you must write; and by the terms of an unwritten contract, the reader will expect memorable characters and scenes guided by a clear forward motion. What the novelist thinks, on the other hand, is
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Audition Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-08-01 Dante Micheaux
Gigglier, gigglierMarian Andersonblushed when the reverendyelled-out, “she sings!”
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from “Siege of the Great Plantation” Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-08-01 Micheaux D.
Massa Cannibal
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from “Pelham” Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-08-01 Dante Micheaux
Breeze filled with the sweet smell of big women on the porch,shelling peas, connecting gossip from their houses—milesapart, across the highway from a field of cotton—in their gingham wrappers and calico aprons, highon the small joys of their hard lives, pulling back the stringof fat pods, one after another, emptying trueharvest into a single bowl and discarding thefruit in a bucket. Behind the house
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Eclogue Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-08-01 Dante Micheaux
“Stranger, where do you come from?Why such a heavy load?”I come from where there is no placefor me. The place that was therewas not for me; the place that is thereis not for me. The load on my backis a lifetime of free work.I have put it behind me.
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Connecticut, After Dark Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-09-23 Ann M Thompson
Unerring and brutaladapter of the soul,
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Burning Fallow Fields Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-09-23 Thompson A.
It comes back at the moment of inhaling:that sweetly acrid smell of meadows burning.
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Northern Light Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-09-06 Thompson A.
So light may be bent by, in essence, an act of will:The turning, fierce decision to go Northtoward the top of night. A vow, a skill,like training an unused muscle, new and sorebut pleasing in the stretch, and in its paindelightful for the proof that there is change.A true explorer’s grit, whose lonely visionis focused on discovery, not time.
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Kenneth Fearing and Human Lifetimes Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-08-23 Halliday M.
The poetry of Kenneth Fearing (1902–1961) is embroiled in—and one is tempted to say devoted to—that range of human feelings that begin with d: depression, dejection, dismay, disgust, desperation, despair. Fearing’s consistent tendency—across three decades of poetry—to express that limited range of feelings no doubt signals a limitation of his achievement; but it’s a limitation much less damaging than
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Against Archaeology Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-08-20 Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody
Tell things as they are.Say it is a map of graves dug up (to be emptied in rows of ill-fitting wooden drawers)in a place called Saint Anne's Field, which in 1891 is being erased, name and all,by two or three washes of brick townhouses and a few small manufactures.Still, I will repeat that it is the earth tallying, crooked and haphazard,in a schoolboy's handwriting, the numbers of the dead it never
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Enrico Testa, “Untitled” Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-08-18 Walters H.
flat on the acupuncture bedwith eight thin metal wandsstuck along the meridiansmy ears track, half awake, half asleep,rush-hour traffic, going and coming.Maybe it’s Genova, maybe Berlin.Probably Fasanenstrasse.The assorted inner racket fades,little by little dying downdisappearing into low tones.It becomes, in the echo of tinnitus,a single sound,steely blue and round,in which is mixeda whisper a long
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Enrico Testa, “Untitled” Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-08-18 Henry Walters
having folded it once then againinto the thinnest of stripsyou kept the ticket for the tram(pink 70 lira slip)tucked between your ring and its finger.When you took me by the handI heard it nick my palm.Sometimes even nowI hear that same scratchingthough my hand is emptyand yours is ashand the ring is deep in a drawerwaiting for thieves
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“Track 20” Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-08-18 Enrico Testa
for almost two months(and it will last till fall)the bougainvillea bloomshang on beside Track 20at the far north end of the station:year after yearit comes up and coversleggily, impulsively,whole stretchesof thick-laid rustybrick of the railroad grade.Remote origins:Yolosa, say, on the valley floorwinding down from Cumbre:rainforests lush and greenpeppered with splashes of orange or purple:the Yungas
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Seafarer Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-08-02 James Longenbach
James Longenbach’s most recent books are Forever and Earthling (both from W. W. Norton) and, in prose, The Lyric Now (University of Chicago Press) and How Poems Get Made (Norton). He is Joseph Gilmore Professor of English at the University of Rochester, NY, USA.
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Eichmann Teaches Himself Hebrew Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-07-16 Moolten D.
He wants to research his enemy, better pursuehis bootlicking dream of timelier trains.But superiors mock the line in his budgetfor “lessons.” Who wouldn't sigh with rolled eyesat the thought of a rebbe's patient nods,Dilbert of the SS choking with metaphysical zealon fricatives like Pesach horseradish,flopping through the calisthenicsof inflection, you dance, we dance, he dances?Alone, he's just a
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Centurion Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-07-16 Hutchinson I.
Telling off the state and president. —Robert Lowell
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Political Violence and the Persuasive Engagement in Frederick Douglass Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-07-01 John Burt
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Rupert Brooke’s Mysterious Widow: The Marchesa Agnes Capponi Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-07-01 Felter M.
Crossing the American continent in the spring of 1913, Rupert Brooke stopped at the Chateau Lake Louise. There he met Leona11 Agnes Smith, Marchesa Capponi. Brooke’s letters to Agnes are few and short; perhaps because of this, no one has paid as much attention to her as to Brooke’s other lovers. Perhaps, too, because the letters from Rupert to Agnes have been known only in incomplete form, some have
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The New Formalism and Heart of Darkness: Aesthetic and Ideological Parallels, Oppositions, and Symmetries Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-06-28 Richardson B.
In her book, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Framework, Caroline Levine has recently offered a radically expanded concept of form in literature. She argues that broadening our definition of form in literary studies to include social arrangements has “immediate methodological consequences. The traditionally troubling gap between the form of the literary text and its content dissolves. Formalist analysis
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For the Garden’s Architect Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-06-22 Balbo N.
Center and right panels, Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights”Thank you for the sinistral paradeon horse- and gryphon-back beneath blue skyaround the wading pool where women gathered,wooed by riders’ antics, mildly charmed.Thank you for the climate, clothing-free,the extra-large blackberry drifting gentlydownstream where, still half-submerged, we feastedtill our next tryst in a giant peach.We took turns
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A Glance and a Goodbye Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-06-22 Ned Balbo
Inside her house, the shelves and hallways markedby souvenirs of Poland or the past,we listened glumly to my grandmother,our visits shorter than she would have liked,the kitchen floor’s scrubbed checkerboard of tilesspotless beneath our shoes until, at last,my father’s glance would signal: Say goodbye.Goodbye to tea gone cold, last bites of babka,news of cousins behind the “Iron Curtain”—Goodbye to
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Restrictive Covenant Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-06-12 Jackson M.
No persons of any race other than the white raceshall use or occupy any building or any lot, exceptthat this covenant shall not prevent occupancy by domesticservants domiciled with an owner or tenant,said the property deed. Somehow I crossedenemy lines, went undetected in the light of day.I wasn’t alone. Three other families made their wayinto Mayfair Park, several Jews. Most neighbors scoffedat the
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Poetic Transmission: Ezra Pound, “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” (1914–1918)—By Rihaku [Li Bai] Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-06-12 Hirsch E.
The River Merchant’s Wife: A LetterWhile my hair was still cut straight across my foreheadI played about the front gate, pulling flowers.You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.And we went on living in the village of Chokan:Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.At fourteen I married My Lord you.I never laughed, being bashful.Lowering my
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Writing White: Martha Collins’s Poetry of Collective Memory Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-05-06 Ruth Williams
Writing in the New York Times in response to the June 17, 2015 shooting of nine African American church members by a white gunman in Charleston, SC, poet Claudia Rankine reflects on the “condition of mourning” that continues to characterize Black lives in the United States, noting, “The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings. Consequently, our
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Vandals Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-05-03 Moolten D.
Each of us has a pierced heart and a voice of glass,too much time and perhaps too little,anonymous except for our promiscuous names.The kicked down door lies like a bridgeinto Rome. We trespass because it’s a rightof passage out from the hard-fought homesof small children and hibernating drunks.But their love only grows moreunavenged with blazing paint and real flames.We conquer the already gutted
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Tesla Literary Imagination (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-05-03 David Moolten
It's a dog's life but what about peopleon the edge of sanity, Fionaheadstrong on a leash, pulling S. back?You can compare the contours of seal pupsto infants, blame dopamine in the hindbrainfor his room an anticipatory shrineof squeaky rubber things, bathetic anecdotesI encourage to induce a laugh.Fiona this, Fiona that, Fiona just turned twelveand I'm terrified. Look at Teslawho endured the same afflictionas