Portside

Fracking Dakota: Poems for a Wounded Land, Peter Neil Carroll's new collection, takes us on a fascinating odyssey across an increasingly broken America. With a cast of characters as disparate as Billy the Kid, closet racists, grave robbers, ghosts along the Natchez Trace, blue collar workers and the short-sighted corporations that exploit them, these poems share an undercurrent of looming disaster, a deep knowing that things are about to turn bad. (Cultural Weekly)

The history of racism in our country is sometimes best understood by looking at how that history unfolded locally, and in places outside the slaveholding South, as well as nationally. Fred Whitehead writes about his own experience growing up in Kansas in the 1950s and about what Brent M. S. Campney, in his new study of that state's bloody Civil War and Post-Civil War racial history, taught him.

After being evicted at the height of the recent foreclosure crisis, a construction worker tries to reclaim his family’s home by taking a new job with the evictor. Ramin Bahrani's '99 Homes', a relatively small, tough-minded drama about pitiless people doing unprincipled things, proves to be one of the most interesting, elegantly crafted and—paradoxically, given the dark subject matter—elating films to come along in recent memory.

Many students have lunch periods that are 20 minutes or less, which can be an insufficient amount of time to eat.

A gray hoodie will not protect her son from rain or cold, writes Massachusetts poet January Gill O'Neil, but a mother's fears for "the darkest child/ on our street" express a deeper threat from the outside as color and race threaten the safety of the young.

Herbert Aptheker, to introduce the man by his highest prestige, was an early scholar of African American uprisings against slavery, and in his middle years, the director and coordinator of the W.E.B. DuBois Papers, one of the great archival triumphs of US history at large. For many in the 60s, through his books and public apperances, a generation became aware of the Communist Party, U.S.A.

The Suppliant Maidens by Aeschylus (ca. 460 BC) is an ancient tale about refugees, sanctuary, and moral duty. Charles McNulty argues that the play provides a precedent for helping us think about today's European refugee crisis. "It provides historical depth" to today's refugee crisis, he says, "framing the basic dramatic situation of its asylum seekers in moral, democratic and religious terms."

Olvidados serves as powerful indictment of the military personnel who were responsible for thousands of deaths and disappearances of political dissidents in Latin America during Operation Condor, estimated at 30,000 forced disappearances, 50,000 deaths, and 400,000 arrests. Beginning in 1975 the political campaign of repression spanned across Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay—carried out by the right-wing military dictatorships, backed by the CIA.

'Show Me A Hero' serves as a reminder that some of the worst segregation in America persists above the Mason-Dixon line.

Warsan Shire, a Kenyan-born Somali poet based in London, addresses the terror and desperation of migrants forced to leave their homes seeking safety, shelter, hope even in strange and often inhospitable lands. Hers is a language of experience and insight, capturing the tension of the current crisis of uprooted people. .