Skip to main content

Poem with an Ear Pressed to the Ground

Kindra McDonald Rattle
“So much of this last year has been about breath and breathing,” writes the poet Kindra McDonald, referring to respirators and the words “I can’t breathe.”

The Railway: An Adventure in Construction

Dragan Plavšić Counterfire
E. P. Thompson a leader among British youth in constructing a Yugoslav railway in 1947. The reviewer faults the book, for boosting the communist regime while exaggerating the role played by the nation’s workers, even as he lauds Thompson’s later work

After Homosexuality

Kate Redburn Dissent Magazine
This book is "an ambitious retelling of the history of capitalism through the politics of gay sex, arrives just in time to help dissuade us of the idea that we have reached the end of gay history."

The Lesbian Bar Project

Anna Hezel Taste
Socioeconomic divisions meant that a lot of women couldn’t afford to go out, or they had children and didn’t have the time to. So how they gathered was through food, and through community. Filmmakers Street and Rose explore the idea of queer food.

Crack

Rebecca Foust New Letters
Rebecca Foust’s poem “Crack” speaks to vulnerability—"just a nick/to break the skin”—that encapsulates the era of pandemic.

Human Conditions, Early and Otherwise

Scott McLemee Inside Higher Ed
The journal’s intrepid book reviewer surveys a mélange of fall 2021 university and scholarly books on human origins and development, finding some surprising commonality in an otherwise often conflictual field.

The ‘Lost World’ of Vittorio De Seta

J. Hoberman The New York Review of Books
Filmed in the 1950s, Vittorio De Seta's luminous shorts depicting the hardscrabble lives of fishermen, shepherds, peasants, and miners in rural Italy turn documentary into art film.