Portside

This poet and this book have just won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award based at Claremont Graduate University. The prize is given to a mid-career poet, and is one of the top literary prizes given in the United States. It is a significant testament to the power of Smith's work. This review shows wide-ranging and powerful art that Patricia Smith practices.

Saying Marxism is a science is preface. Add organized sarcasm and we come closer to mocking not so much intimate feelings associated with worldly illusions but their form in a particular perishable world. It aims to give new form to certain aspirations, the better to regenerate them. Yet if Marxist movements are to be effective, they must create new tastes and a new language for struggles to be born. Sarcasm then is about what outrages our sense of what should be.

Audre Lorde (1934-1992) was one of the most significant U.S. writers of the last quarter of the 20th Century. She described herself as "Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet." This new collection of her poetry and prose allows readers to remind themselves of her thought and its significance.

We’re not living in the dystopias of George Orwell or Aldous Huxley, the author insists, but in the shifty algorithmic universe of Philip K. Dick, where the world that the Internet and social media shape is less a system than an ecology, a proliferation of unexpected niches, and entities created and adapted to exploit them in deceptive ways. In this view, it’s a world in which technology is developing in ways that fudge the difference between the human and the artificial.

This "very important" book offers a new examination of the role of African Americans in the American Revolution and of how racism was used in the service of creating the United States in the late 18th Century.

A first-rate compendium of environmental sanity, the book under review is also a sound, radical and compelling critique of capitalist planning, making the case that only a revolutionary transformation on socialist principles can generate the political framework needed to save the planet.

This book has prompted a wide-ranging and rich discussion about the state of liberal democracy today, especially in the United States. Here, reviewer Issac uses the book to inquire into a wide range of topics regarding how we might think about democratic norms and procedures in the current period.

Sun Tsu said “Know your enemy and know yourself and you will always be victorious." Following that wisdom, Portside is running this otherwise execrable interview with Niall Ferguson, a leading myrmidon of the white shoe Right, trumpeting his retrograde views on—among other things— reactionary icons Edmund Burke and Charles Murray, along with snarky comments on unnamed post-colonial critics who he doubts—with no justification—never read his work.

Le Guin's novels, short stories, and poems have been delighting audiences for over half a century.

Shortly before his death, James Baldwin wrote that in the U.S., “White is a metaphor for power,” an observation that is deep background for much of the discussion in the masterly book under review, where race and class are intertwined, yet surface differences are used to split the labor force and maintain capital’s hegemony. The book can usefully inform debate on race and class and aid in reconstructing a revolutionary project in the context of Trumpworld.