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The Latest

Club, Cult, Sanctuary, or Studio

By Juan Carlos Ramos

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A Review of Matthew Binder’s Pure Cosmos Club
Stalking Horse Press, 2023

The New York City art scene can be described in one word: pretentious. So let’s get as unpretentious as possible, and clarify that term with The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (my dictionary of choice), which defines the word as “making an exaggerated outward show, ostentatious.”...

The Research Comes with the Psychology of the Characters

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An Interview with James Reich

By Jordan A. Rothacker

This is the second time I’ve interviewed James Reich, and it is good to catch up with him after the publication of his newest novel, The Moth for the Star, released in late 2023 from 7.13 Books. This haunting and masterful novel takes the reader right into the heart of “dark Modernism,” a territory...

Lord of Creation and All Corruption

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A Review of James Reich’s The Moth for The Star

By John Mirkovic

In The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, the urban sub-chaos softly closes with the image of the Arthurian Fisher King, sitting upon the shore, waiting for his chosen successor, wondering “Shall I at least set my lands in order?” In his slim yet cinematically plot-driven novel, The Moth for the...

No Foul Play Suspected

By Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer

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When I was a little kid, my father coming home from work was an event we looked forward to every day. We’d all follow him, Mom, my brother Michael, and me, into the bedroom and watch him take his clothes off. First he’d take off his shirt—he always wore a white undershirt that he never removed—then his pants. He wore white Jockey underwear. The long ones. I don’t think they were called boxer...

A New American Prophetess

by Pam Jones

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The art of taking the divine throne is in its grandiosity. The question asked of a new messiah is, “How big can you make yourself?” In addition, perhaps, “How colorful are you?” “How much are you willing to suffer?” “For how long can you keep the narrative going?” And, foremost, “How will you survive a mutiny?” For Petra Caldwell, these queries are not posed outright, though they are necessary in...

Language Is Power When Repurposing Twain

by Paula Bomer

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In James, slaves speak in slave language in front of their masters to appease them or—as said on the first page, and a theme repeated throughout the novel—to “give white folks what they want.” When slaves are alone together, they talk in erudite English. In this way, they have their own secret language, one they perform for white people. (. . .) This hiding of their true selves, and the...

Dream Stranger, Dream Stranger

by Simon Skrepek

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>> Simultaneously they describe it as a commodity among others. So what is it now? The supreme magic erotic energy life force of change, or a currency paid in orgasms? It exists either suppressed under dogma and taboo, or owned and sold in free-market equivalence <<

Excerpts from “My Women”

by Yuliia Iliukha

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The woman suffered. Her soul ached from this slow-paced life that used to be so familiar and dear to her. The woman felt guilty for not having seen the war, not having heard its sounds, not having sensed its smells. She blamed herself for living as if nothing had happened, as if that February had not divided the life of the whole country into a before and an after.

Six Poems from “The Ruins of Nostalgia”

by Donna Stonecipher

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If nostalgia is primarily aesthetic, then it is also unstable, and if we get attached to beautiful images today, we might spurn them tomorrow. We might love the beautiful images because we can’t apprehend them, “the beautiful” always relocating itself, unrecognizable as the city outside, which is why we keep trying to rebuild the city in our minds.

Three poems

BY MELISSA HOTCHKISS

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I have a hostage code, a panic button, motion detectors, sensors

The dryer has run all day, I can’t find my checkbook

The new light bulbs (so I am told) will last forever

Elegy

By Alfred Corn

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“If only.” Said only if a mixed-media retrospect

is also being salvaged, the herringbone chevron

a swimmer inscribes on the mirroring lake.

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