clean of me, my rod, / creel, sturdy / shoes, jack knife.
“You know when you watch a movie and there's a crumbling bridge and somebody's running, trying to make it to the other side?” Flores told me, describing the mad dash of writing that allowed him …
Even as she draws on autobiography and research, Rojas Contreras maintains her sense of wonder, likening herself to a shapeshifter who appreciates being changed by stories.
In 1930’s Denver, Luz Lopez is left to fend for herself after her older brother, Diego, is run out of town by a violent white mob. She begins to have visions of her Indigenous homeland in the …
What the novelist Rudolfo Anaya did for New Mexico, or what cultural critic Fran Lebowitz does for New York City, Raquel does in BROWN NEON for Los Angeles, San Antonio, and Tucson. Every generation …
The God of this novel is infinite, inside everything, and yet its absence can be felt on every page. This diffuse and elusive God requires a different kind of prayer, one that is collective and …
In their entry on love, Berlant writes that we tend to (mistakenly) use the objects our desire attaches to in order to assume an identity— “you know who you ‘are’ only by interpreting where …
Central to Beast at Every Threshold is the question of one’s identity and place—the poet writing against disappearance, but also to weave a tapestry of loved ones and influences. To choose …
For Berlant, part of the problem of politics is that marginalized people have to accommodate the feelings of their majority counterparts in order to successfully exist in public, or else those …
It is not Lee’s intent to trivialize any type of death or trauma by juxtaposing the simultaneous banality and brutality of isolation; it is perhaps not even Lee’s intent to distinguish between …
Inter State is infused with some of the same passions many of us youth poets had back then, not just for our craft, but for our immediate surroundings—for our respective slice of the City or the …
Lauren Berlant was ripe for imitation. Some young scholars imitated them in their writing in the hopes of being taken more seriously, disgruntled students imitated them as a way of venting their …
Gulf Coast’s newest online feature “Beyond Lauren Berlant” pulls together a series of works, to be published monthly between February and June of 2022, inspired by the late scholar and cultural …
Address: Papa has a lot of rules and his new rule is that we’d better not tell people where we live anymore. He used to not care, and I was allowed to invite my friends over and give them the …
I’m so well recovered I dream of cramming teeth into my gums. Smile like an alley of garbage cans, a pane of bowling pins. Give me metal, I’ll gift you a turkey. And now the poem turns to …
You once said to me—as a joke, I suppose—that all your books are “brief, collaborative, and plagiarized,” but really what is the secret to your somewhat monomaniacal rate of production, …
On 9/11, with the radio transcribing the ongoing events and his white coworkers in the plant nursery going mad as though the place was burning down, all my dad could do was laugh. As far as he knew, …
When someone at school asks, “Where are you from?” what they mean is, “Are you from the wet side or the dry side?” You are from the wet side, the side more prone to damage.
It turns out some people will risk anything for a haircut. They will meet under a bridge, they will text unknown numbers, they will venture out into a pandemic. It turns out that I may have a strange …
We have, all of us, predicted our deaths. By predicted I mean conjured or imagined, wished for or used as a weapon, a means of manipulation.