To recreate being a certain age in a certain era takes great skill:  getting your facts straight, your feelings appropriate to the time, maybe going back to your own memory but still keeping the perspectives of the characters, which are not necessarily your own.

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The last thing I remember before coming to at Mt. Sinai was lying on my belly on the floor of my bedroom, surrounded by five cops, enormous from my vantage point. They talked among themselves and on their radios, ignoring me. Finally, they cuffed me behind my back; I begged them to tell me what I had done, but I was not worth a word.

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Police created the modern concept of Identity through this assumption of universal guilt among the working class. One is a thief unless one can prove otherwise. Thievery is not merely punished; it is prevented by this pragmatic measure. Have your identity card or go to gaol. 

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I was the rabbit in that play, once, not that long ago. Since then I have travelled and crossed paths with these characters, in a dotted line from Baton Rouge, Louisiana to Coney Island, New York where I am currently writing these words in the poison gasses of my computer screen. If I were to borrow the Prince’s telescope I might still be able to see our paths entangled.

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Joanne Kyger died yesterday, March 22, 2017. In 2003, I reviewed her 2002 book, As Ever, Selected Poems for the now-defunct nthposition. I place the review here.

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{ The analogic is the dirty little secret of the digital. The analog is abject, tawdry, sleazy, as-if and nothing more. The fissured body is a wound sutured in silence or resulting in death. The digital is an application upon the body of the analogic. The digital functions as a gate against the analogic. The digital is the enclave of the rich; the finer the raster, the richer the enclave. }

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In terms of confronting the man’s racism, of course, that question doesn’t really matter, but it nonetheless put me in mind of how easy it is for Jews, white or of color, to pass as not-Jewish until we either self-identify or are outed—a term I am using purposefully, since there are still places in the world, including the hallowed halls of American academia, where it is not always safe to be known publicly as a Jew.

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Tensions have been high since the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released a letter on November 25th, 2016 stating that it will close all lands north of the Cannonball River, which is where the Oceti Sakowin camp is located. The letter further stated that anyone on the property after Dec. 5 will be considered trespassing and may be subject to arrest. Many immediately feared the worst, as a number of the water protectors have had previous run-ins with the heavily militarized police force that is guarding the pipeline.

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Living my life as a creative, intellectual black woman has me just one tripwire away from destroying the psyche of so many around me.  This has always left me in a state of confusion. Confidence and strength—necessary lifelines in this skin—become a cumbersome Catch-22 in which many need me to play the jaded, angry black woman, standoffish queen, or paragon of ornamental virtue for everyone who needs a little authentic color in their life.

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Carla Williams is back in the neighborhood where her parents were raised: the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. There, she's opened Material Life, a populist art gallery and/or high-end gift shop that focuses on affordable pieces by outstanding contemporary artists. Guest Editor Rosalyn Spencer interviewed her for this issue.

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Even though he sold millions of copies of his 33 books, many critics have viewed Yerby as nothing more than a pulp novelist who wrote pot boilers for money and nothing more. Robert Bone famously called Yerby the “prince of pulpsters” (176). However, some challenge that view, commenting on Yerby’s subversive undertones and his rewriting of Southern Romances like Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1936).

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Augusta Fells Savage, beaten as a child for sinning.  Her sin?  Sculpting clay animals.  And still she worked.  She worked to share her vision.  Her vision took her to Rome and Paris and back again to teach, to create, to better, to live.

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Perhaps, in a futile attempt to understand what happened there, I returned to Dhaka through Google’s Street View, walking through placid images of days less heavy with sadness. I walked to my house. To the homes of my loved ones. To school and the expat bars at which we would spend many weekend nights.

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Black Lives Matter started the night George Zimmerman got away with killing Trayvon Martin. After hearing the verdict, Garza used the phrase “Black Lives Matter” in a Facebook post. “Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter, Black Lives Matter”

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Solarpunk is a rebellion against the structural pessimism in our late visions of how the future will be. Not to say it replaces pessimism with Pollyanna-ish optimism, but with a cautious hopefulness and a daring to tease out the positive potentials in bad situations. Hope that perhaps the grounds of an apocalypse (revelation) might also contain the seeds of something better...

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I woke up Sunday at 5:15 a.m. to police in full riot gear shouting from every direction, “Get out of your tent! Hands in the air!” More than 60 police officers, who had arrived in two buses, flooded a camp of more than 100 activists who had been occupying the railroad tracks leading to the Shell and Tesoro Oil refineries in Anacortes, Washington.

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We read a fair amount of news, but it was three days before we learned that the anonymous whistleblower who released the Panama Papers had written a manifesto. So we decided to reproduce it here. We think you'll find it a solid piece of writing.

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It might be that the anarchist traveler scene died when Sali died, on September 15, 2008, as summer gave way to autumn. It was two weeks before her twenty-first birthday.

It might be that the man who killed her marked the end of a way of life.

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Meanwhile, in Aliyyah’s life, another drama was building.  She was down at the Matagarup Nyungar refugee camp, an urban settlement that redefined the notion of refugees.  A group of Nyungar, the first nation of West Australia’s south-west, had welcomed the urban homeless onto their traditional lands.  Aliyyah was there, blogging her experience on social media, when the Perth Police and Rangers descended on the camp, taking most of the campers possessions.  They took all the tents.  They took bedding, clothes, even children’s toys.

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