Portside

New York poet Howie Good, winner of the Prize Americana for poetry in 2015, opens a window to a natural world--"Some Sort of Shining"-- that's always there, but seldom seen.

Never before the period 1918-60 had so many young people, from so many sections of society, danced so much. In Britain, as in the United States, dancing morphed from a craze to part of daily life. Before that, dancing as frequent social activity was reserved for the privileged. This changed followed the opening of specially built dance halls after World War I, influenced by US styles and catering to a lower-middle and working-class public with rising wages.

Patricia Highsmith published "The Price of Salt" in 1952 under the name "Claire Morgan," a pseudonym. Since then, the book has become a classic of lesbian literature. Filmmaker Todd Haynes has recently released "Carol," his film adaptation of the novel, to wide acclaim. John Copenhaver reconsiders the original novel, guiding us through this suspenseful tale.

The politics of The Hunger Games series aren’t as revolutionary as they’ve been hyped to be. Far from helping us reveal our most pressing contemporary problems, the liberal ideological message of The Hunger Games is that the major problems facing society today are state domination, dictatorships, and the restriction of individual liberties — in short, everything except for exploitation and capitalism.

The anthropologist Sidney Mintz has died at the age of 93. His book, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, used sugar as an entry point into a critical analysis of social institutions, in this case slavery, race, class, and global capitalism. The book continues to be relevant to those concerns as well as to today’s obsession with sugar consumption.

Context is crucial to the politics of a narrative, always. In the context of the #BlackLivesMatter protests, and the increasing public focus on police brutality toward particularly African American communities in the U.S., it is important to ask how the fantasy of Luke Cage – a black man who is “unbreakable” – fits into the current socio-political landscape.

Brooklyn poet Ally Malinenko offers a sardonic/graphic expose of East Germany's nostalgia for the old days.