Triple check the joist hooked / from your garage ceiling / is rated for at least 97 pounds.
We talked about light and dark, how to render it in paintings and drawings, and how it connects to spirit. We talked about Emerson and Thoreau. They connected their faiths to mine, to the pantheism I …
I’d bicycle home after teaching, pumping the pedals so hard I hoped the blurred street would crack beneath them. I’d learned early how to leap—from hotel maid to fine dining server, student to …
By recreating the past, I do not mean going back in a sentimental nostalgic way, but by rebellion and opposition to a world in which we see more and more borders, and walls.
I once drove around southwest Arizona with a photographer named Pedro, from Mexico City. His specialty was making ethnographic forays into North America, and on this trip he was studying the culture …
"I've always been interested in the invisible poem. When a poem is finished, what is the undercurrent? What is it still trying to say?"
My old friend and former teacher Steve Orlen and I walked many miles together along the wide avenues of Tucson, Arizona. Our promenades usually took place after the dinner hour, in the evening, when …
I think of poetry as musical language, close to every day speech but of a higher order, with a system of notation.
That exalted moment when, out of nowhere, you are obliterated—completely, blissfully destroyed—by a voluptuous euphoria. A lightning flash of inspiration. That is white heat.
During the month of October 2018, two solo shows in Houston feature artists whose paths crossed fourteen years ago for this Art Lies interview.
Eliot said that modern poetry is required to be difficult to understand because modern reality is difficult. But some poets are going to want poems to be seamless and available and clear as distilled …
The epigraph: that little sentence or quote that precedes a story, chapter, or essay. Roxane Gay can’t stand them. Over the last decade, she’s made her case. In PANK in 2009: “[T]here is never …
In 2004, the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio exhibited paintings by Valdez related to prizefighting. The Houston writer Garry Reece published this review in Volume 44 of ArtLies , in which he traces …
We're not here yet, and still the key aches in the lock. I am leaving, and it's as if I was returning
A friend in England asked me just recently whether I thought her work had become too much like 'the last cry of a dinosaur.' I thought not, but it made me wonder whether the whole art endeavour …
Thursday, August 24, 2017 Hurricane preparation begins with a conversation about a small claims court case involving a batch of botched edible underwear. I am on the phone with my mother who is …
I left my sandals on the stoop and they were borrowed by someone who needs wet shoes
My grandmother, Marisol, taught me to respect storms. Hurricanes deserved respect more than fear. Fear freezes you, Moni, her nickname for me, she’d say. But that was in Guanajuato, where the rules …
the realtor reassures my family father: 34-years-old | catholic-by-culture | first in his family to buy a house mother: 33-years-old | catholic-converter | new job as claims adjuster brother: …
Texas State Highway 3 runs for thirty-some-odd miles, from the southeastern edge of Houston down to Galveston, covering a flat stretch of coastal plain now blanketed over in suburban sprawl: …