Portside

The New Jersey-born poet Kyle Dargan adds irony to our reckless consumer economy, tracing the impulse to a juvenile urge to grow up.

Fed -up with the imperial adventures of their own western capitalist governments, some radicals wrongly side with foreign dictators in the name of anti-imperialism. The book under review aims to move beyond a disabling “the West and the rest” binary.

About one-half of all higher education teachers and professors are contingent, or adjunct, laborers. This book portrays this crisis, and even though it is a flawed treatment, reviewer Roth finds some things of interest in this study.

Billingham has used his camera to create personal, intensely specific images that double as snapshots of urban poverty and parental neglect. In that respect, Ray & Liz extends, and also interrogates the impulse to transform life into art.

Iowa is unrecognizable from centuries ago, when Europeans took the land for themselves. What were prairie and wetlands are now neatly partitioned grids of intensely cultivated land: the model for the farm as factory.

It’s not enough to settle for having a flat, oversimplified version of feminism on television. The conversation is nuanced and deserves representation as such.

Illinois poet Jeff Balch takes some liberties with Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” turning the verse into something like the voice of our president, if he were poetic.

Few films portray working people realistically. One thinks of rare movies such as Hollywood’s Norma Rae, the independent Salt of the Earth, Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike or the Italian classic, The Organizer.

Here is a book that many will find helpful in trying to understand, and explain, the various ways that bias works in contemporary society.

Newly restored, Elaine May’s darkest comedy is one of the great underappreciated American movies of the 1970s.