ISSUES | fall 2020

Fighting Back Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood. —Dante, The Divine Comedy While temperamentally…    read more

Forbidden   Let me go back to my father in the body of my mother the day he told her, Having black children won’t save you when the revolution comes.…    read more

Murphy, Murphy One of my names is Cece. It has many iterations. When scolded, Cecelia. At my worst, Cecelia Rose. In bed, I am named to the rhythm of my…    read more

Not All That White Everyone on the raising gang notices when the journeyman connector, Joseph Bogoslavsky, reaches into his fifty-pound leather tool belt for four massive bolts and then sinks…    read more

Way Back, Well before My Divorce There was this other thing that happened. Or really two things bundled. While visiting my then girlfriend’s older sister in New York City, I…    read more

You’ll Look Back on This and Laugh The woman behind the bar used to smile. These days her face was shielded in a frown distinct despite the eternal woolen cap.…    read more

Magnet Man I shift from foot to foot. Both my feet hurt. I’m packing magnets at my dad’s factory, and the rubber mats meant to cushion my joints from the…    read more

Elixir When I was five, I discovered alcohol in abandoned red cups scattered about the Green House, the first place we lived in Detroit after Venezuela.   Dad rolled blunts…    read more

I’ve Got an Asinine Affinity (Infinity?), a Clumsy Love Song The bees of the heart weave stillness into a conversation. String theory is smaller than the bees in the honey…    read more

Just Nina Mae: The Struggle of an Early African American Movie Star During Hollywood’s early years, tantalizing stories of discovery flourished, luring young hopefuls to the fledgling industry out west.…    read more

Mash-up: The Enduring Fusion of High Art and Mass Culture In 1912 at his Boulevard Raspail studio in Montparnasse, Picasso hung a changing installation of collages on a beige wall…    read more

from “Interview: A Conversation with Jeff Tweedy” PIAFSKY: How did you come to be friends with George Saunders? TWEEDY: We were both booked to be on the last show of…    read more

Why, Oh Why, Poetry?: On Recent Prose about Poetry and the Future of the Art Andrew Mulvania   Why Poetry by Matthew Zapruder. Ecco, 2017, 256 pp., $24.99 (hardcover). The…    read more