Statement of Record

CategoryCriticism

The Shape-Shifter

by Dawn Raffel

T

Theatrix is chock-full of trap doors, of trompe-l’oeils and mirrors. The ground is not solid; the air is not safe; the coast is not clear; the rug will be pulled out from under your feet. You feel it in your bones. Svoboda’s lines are elegant but she is equally eloquent in moving the “parts that can’t speak, or parts speaking inaudibly,” the innermost parts of our messy and...

A Recipe for Daphne

A

One of the aspects of the Rum community that Anastasiadou wants to highlight in the text is the community’s fear of and exclusion from mainstream Turkish society. This is rooted deep into Turkish history. Although at its founding the new Republic of Turkey was ostensibly a secular nation, it was explicitly built with a Turkish and Muslim identity at its core. This left non-Muslim minorities such...

Ishiguro’s “Klara and the Sun”

I

By Yvonne C. Garrett

Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel since his Nobel Prize (2017) explores the nature of human love and the ethics of Artificial Intelligence. The narrator is Klara, a human-like android known as an Artificial Friend or “AF,” explicitly designed to be a companion for a human child. Klara’s unique perspective draws us into her world: a near...

Context Collapse (continued)

C

Context Collapse is a long, mock-academic, critical essay poem. Beginning in ancient Greece and continuing beyond the present, it examines how the increasingly wide gulf between poets and their audiences are mediated by new communications technologies and changes in publishing economies, and how this, in turn, significantly impacts poetic form.

Context Collapse

C

Context Collapse is a long, mock-academic, critical essay poem. Beginning in ancient Greece and continuing beyond the present, it examines how the increasingly wide gulf between poets and their audiences are mediated by new communications technologies and changes in publishing economies, and how this, in turn, significantly impacts poetic form.

On Crushing: an excerpt

O

By Cara Diaconoff

Think the word “lonely.” See the little girl moping in the corner of the schoolyard or the homeless man hunched over a grate. When one reads that some well-known person was lonely, isn’t there always a small twinge of surprise? One thinks, it must mean ‘lonely’ on the inside. To be really alone in the world is to be young, innocent—or to be so much...

A Coincidental Exchange between Life and Art

A

by Lee Clough

Can we “be” as a statement? Exist as an exploration? Represent a philosophy with our own bones? Norwegian author Edy Poppy’s curious interplay of life and writing unravel in her novel Anatomy. Monotony.

Life Mimics Art

How would you live, if you knew your actions—even the most intimate ones—could be...

Coming of Age(s)

C

I never really considered my twenties until now. But here I am.

How can it be that I’m now old enough to be left for a younger woman? To have to attend a funeral on my birthday? To embrace apathy by fixating on work, which mercifully leaves little time for self-reflection at the end of the day (supplemented with weed at night to ensure dreams don’t...

Turning Glass into Sky

T
Melanie Bishop

Each character is introduced with one specific detail, and then bam, surprise pregnancy. Marriage. We've slid into the world of this essay with so little fanfare. Another writer might spend pages developing the romance, building the relationship, pondering the pregnancy issue. But Sundberg gets right to the crux matter: two people, a child, a lot of unknowns. A crap shoot...

Statement of Record

Follow Me