I currently live within the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh. My mission is to document the Rohingya lifestyle, our daily struggles, and the deeply personal stories that often go unheard.
Much of what is here was given to me: the green trunk and the folded winter clothes by a friend whose family left Habba Kadal, other details by voices I found in testimony and reporting. I have tried to hold what was shared with me without claiming it as mine.
Marina Blitshteyn’s poetry collection form a more perfect starts from an awkward fact: much of what we call the self has been decided before we have decided anything. A name, a language, a sex, a country, a class, a family history—these come first and speak through us.
Reading by J. Raymond Bennett Author’s Note: Absurdity exists during indirect fire while waiting for the all clear. You’re surrounded by imperfect people that you’ve learned so much about. “Concrete Cathedral” celebrates but does not
But I was not a general magpie. I was a dimensionally discontented magpie. Without regular access to flight, our perception comes unmoored from all four magnetic dimensions and three temporal dimensions, nearly bringing us down to dimensional par with humans.
İlhan Sami Çomak speaks to reporters outside Marmara Prison, formerly known as Silivri Prison, following his release on November 26, 2024, after more than thirty years of incarceration.
Back then I was immediately drawn to Esber’s work by the unfettered appropriation of images he took from mainstream media sources: history books, TV, newspapers, and magazines. From his perspective, these photos were ubiquitous in American culture and fodder for creating paintings that had an indirect yet palpable link to the Vietnam War.
The air is thick with billowing dust from hundreds of military transports and white pickup trucks—I’d forgotten the white trucks. The frightened crowd nearby falls silent as they pass. A contagion of despair drifts around us.
This is the fairytale you inherit. Told at kitchen tables, retold in sighs and sorrowful silences. The details are few, but the shape of the story remains. You fill in the rest with the whispering ghosts
Cry HavocBy Jack CarrSimon & Schuster, 2025. 560 pp. I am a pacifist, opposed to war across the board, and it is as a pacifist that I am reviewing Jack Carr’s Cry Havoc, a book that
Author’s note: In this poem, I sought to explore Jakarta as a place of the past that has inherited a history of colonial occupation and violence. Through a semi-autobiographical account of my father’s and grandfather’s
O Lord, take away immortality,
but leave this cold apple cellar.
Take the souls and all your playthings, but spare our lives,
neither Adam’s, nor Eve’s, nor your son’s,
but my son’s life.
