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 water, and maybe narrative and a lucid report on human nature and experience.

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 a good reason for an epigraph in the creative form... I’m even starting to resent epigraphs in essays and short stories.” In a book review in 2011: “I never find the relevance of an epigraph no matter how hard I try.”

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 the dubious history of professional fighting and compares…

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 wasn't a little like that dinosaur's last cry. Art has been…

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 regaling me with her latest round of America’s Court binge-watching,…

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 seemed different somehow. When I arrived in Houston ten…

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: 15-years-old | green-belt | future football star sister: 11-years-old…

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: master-planned communities, Ellington Field Joint Reserve Base,…