A Labor and a Language of Love (or, What Are You Gonna Do with that Humanities PhD?) Once upon a time, before I was a nurse and a student midwife, I went to graduate school with a very different goal in mind: a PhD in English. Fresh out of undergrad, with vague ideas about feminism and about changing the world, a love of books, and precious few ideas about what I could do with my degree, I left the city in which I’d spent my entire life and moved to California to become an academic. Many things changed while I was in grad school– I met new people and lost touch with others, I got married, I had two daughters– but others remained the same– I still considered myself a book-loving feminist, and I still wanted to change the world. And by the time I was in the dissertation phase, [...]

It’s the very last day of 2014, and I wanted to post one more installment of TheThe Infoxicated Corner before we take off a few (more) weeks, and I catch y’all again a bit later into the New Year. I can’t believe Infoxicated went live at the beginning of September: the past few months have flown by, and yet I have the feeling that we’ve gone some crazy places together through all the absolutely stunning contributions people have shared with us. I feel very blessed to have brought y’all this amazing stuff, and really grateful to the other TheThe crew, who invited me and and gave me my own little corner. (How sad would it be if I didn’t have this platform, and this embarrassment of aesthetic/creative riches had been kept to my quiet little niche of SoCal?) And I’m really pleased — no, I think a better word might [...]

There are few poets in America who generate as much excitement among poets and critics alike as Dorothea Lasky. Her radically straightforward diction and deadpan delivery have generated some of the most talked about collections in recent American poetry: Awe (2007), Black Life (2010) and Thunderbird (2012), all from indie super-presence Wave Books. In her most recent collection, Rome, her first with the revived (and storied) Norton imprint Liveright, Lasky pushes her now-recognizable voice into a desperately new register, and the direction is incredibly promising. Though these poems at time spin their wheels to little effect (or affect), there are as many or more moments when their witchy self-talk seems to break through its own artifice, establishing contact with something entirely other. “Is it true that all trees are the same All houses are the same Is it true that all people are the same We eat from the same [...]

Anyone with decent vision can spot the differences in the two photographs below, but to fully appreciate each incarnation of this house as a work of art, you must first know something about . The Heidelberg Project was started by Tyree Guyton, with his grandfather, Sam Mackey, in Detroit, Michigan, in 1986. They started The Heidelberg Project in the McDougall-Hunt neighborhood, on the east side of Detroit, on Heidelberg Street. Tyree had come back home from serving in the military, and was shocked and saddened to see that his old neighborhood had begun to deteriorate. Crime rates were high, and community morale was low. Tyree embarked on an optimistic, tenacious, ultimately very successful project to transform his neighborhood to an indoor-and-outdoor art museum, maintained not just by artists but also by the community. He started by painting a series of houses on the street that had fallen into disrepair — [...]

Drought Every day ripe corn lingers in the field unpicked: silk, more brittle in the sun husk, papery from the heat cob, like bone—no rain on the horizon— rows of kernels puckering, until the corn prays for even earworms and flea beetles to come, lest it fall back to the dirt untasted Yield You are buckled in, strapped down, belt tensioned across your hips, crossed taut from your shoulder— doors locked & rumbling as the car rolls, skids, slides across the blacktop— the graceless ballet of a car crash tearing up squares of sod with shredded tires the vicious perfume of oil & burnt rubber from tires, safety brakes locked & useless— somersaults in nearly perfect arcs, punctuated by the squeal & shriek of bending metal finally just the hiss, rattling like a gentleman snake, you come to a full stop, softer than you’d braced for: then, just the quiet [...]

Repeating the Alarm …when he sings he has the most wonderful voice. —Hillary Cook, dentist The neighbor’s house is an empire and the empire is shut tight tonight. And all the lights are off in the empire and all the doors are locked keeping everything imperial inside, where it leans toward the window unseen. The monkeys scream in the trees, green vervet complete their circle of noise in the leaves. Leaves shake down and they stay in the trees. The boy’s dark skin is worn white at the knees. The empire has him tied to a bed. Teeth cracked from bark and bone, tough love, the sinewed arms. A light coat of fur covers his chest and his back. The boy cannot eat stew or any cooked food. Yet he fingers fork tines, fingers a spoon. The boy cannot stand upright without the help of a chair or the stump [...]

In Kristy Bowen’s dream-like, three-part jewel, The Shared Properties of Water and Stars (, 2014), Bowen describes her own work as a “strange little fairy tale.” Broken up into three parts, the poems radiate a murky symbolism that is mysterious and sexualized, echoing and promising violence: women carry boxes of sadness, lace drags on the ground, sometimes the lace is blood-stained. Hundreds of bears lumber and low softly outside the windows. There is also mystery — a forest, ghosts who carry tangerines. Elegant descriptions and short sentences propel the reader down a surreal, prose-poetic rabbit hole: “There are three houses in three different colors. Each owner keeps a certain kind of sadness locked in the cupboard. The tall man lives in the white house. The short man keeps rabbits as pets…The woman in the second house keeps her sadness in a smallish box…The girl with the blonde hair lives next [...]

Mary Tewksbury is a whiskey-swiggin’, bluegrass-pickin’ singer-songwriter from upstate New York, who frequently performs solo, as well as with the band Next to Kin. She got this tattoo to carry with her a representation of “strong and beautiful women taking a hold of life.” For Tewks, this concept is bound up with her love of music. She chose the spot for her ink — her right upper arm — based upon the old idea that the right side of the body conveys a public image to the world (when having one’s palms read, for example, the right palm frequently suggests what personal traits one is comfortable displaying as a public image, or the identity you want to project to people around you). “This is the comfortable side of me,” she explains. “Music is my truest passion in lfe.” Her tattoo artist, , has spent the past several years working at [...]

​In relationships, how do we manage our multiple selves? Can we truly be the same person alone and with others? The Green Condition, by Elizabeth J. Colen, explores the notion of the self. Part collage, part lyric essay, and part animal invocation, Colen traverses different spheres: Roman history, the domestic space, poetic space, academia, loneliness, solitude, a complicated relationship and the environment of the Pacific Northwest; and she writes about how physical spaces change us, make us take notice and listen. In these physical spaces the narrator is settled and unsettling: “I didn’t want to move here” and “I didn’t want to move here, but I’m growing to like it: the water, the planes, the neighbors even. The unexpected quiet.” As the relationship begins to unravel, the narrator becomes more entwined with the physical world: “That week the spring tides: the water recedes far into the bay and the mudflats [...]

BY INDUSTRY AND INGENUITY Whatever gowns you wear for the gala dances— the fabrics exotic against fingertips, the bottoms flowing behind your feet with your stride, hugging a shape buried within, colors unnatural and explosive, hems spreading out in designs common of ornate carpets or awnings— these are all a language untranslatable to me, guttural and non Latin. Are we trying to buck perception, the enveloping sea? This is a culture of ornament, of collections. Some contain gazes, some victims. Imagine taking a limo around a busy block and rolling the window down so just your gloved hand can wave at the pedestrians as they look and try to find a recognizable face, understand the way that whoever within has had her hopes realized. It’s not terrible, but it sounds like it when we’re on one side of the glass. Cover yourself in tinsel, let the police figure out who [...]

Just in time for November’s end, this week’s feature offers a heady mix of augury and inspiration. Here’s the stunning title poem from Kirun Kapur’s new book, a powerful first first collection that charts indelible histories. Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist I don’t know when I realized he had one eye that watched me, alive, the other free to read the heavens. Could he see I grew where others couldn’t? Could he read my face, in its lines all their faces—my aunt’s that morning, in the mirror beside mine, hissed, don’t stare, don’t forget details, it’s your honor to look for all of us. Did he see I hated his eye, sometimes, hated my honor: the hand always above me. Which eye reads that hand? Which eye can judge its weight? I wanted to look away. Wanted to cry. His untethered eye was milky as a teacup. Why have you come [...]

When I first read Bishop as a young poet, I was dazzled by her perfect syntax and rhythmic modulation, the nearly flawless detail of images. Rereading her as, I would like to think, a mature poet, I am struck by the power of her social conscience. Pity is the underlying feeling she conveys, compassion and a deep feeling for the injustice of privilege. Few of her poems overtly express outrage, but it is very much at the surface with a poem like Pink Dog. It is so clearly about how society at large treats its poor and homeless, wanting them to just dress up and play a part so we don’t have to feel uncomfortable by their presence. But in light of it, I reflected on other, earlier, Bishop poems and realize they do the same thing, such as House Guest. Here is a figure who is forced to live [...]

Note: The first of the three poems below is a continuation of the above excerpt from Zenith — written in the voice of Mina, Coco’s mother and a Romani poet, “Mina the Lotus” is from Zenith‘s book-within-a-book, titled Eating the Midnight Lotus. Mina the Lotus A conversation between Mina and Sati Sara, the Romani Goddess of Fate, Time, and Chaos If, like you say, I am rooted in you as a lotus is rooted in water, then where are you, Dark One? I don’t ask that you tell me but nothing could live without water this long— The problem with you, Goddess, is you only know spirits and mine’s inside a body, so when you say all of this is an illusion you speak to my ransacked shell, cracked open where it matters, so your words trickle out. I live in Paris, not the Ganges. Your blood is not the [...]

Mostly, this week I decided to run things that make me feel good on an experiential, instinctive level. I kept jokingly thinking, “It’s Thanksgiving! Here’s what I’m thankful for,” as I was putting the pieces together. It’s funny, though — so much of how we approach the idea of Thanksgiving is bound up in temporal vicissitudes. The way we talk and think about this American tradition — what it even means to have an “American tradition,” really — has changed so much even within my own lifetime. And I can’t approach it in my own mind any way but cumulatively. I know it’s pretty en vogue, in our ironic culture, to focus on the myriad negative aspects of traditional American holidays, especially one so wrought with a history of racism, war, violence, and mundane human unkindness — you can’t talk about depictions of Pilgrims and Native Americans without that, right? [...]