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? [...]

Poetry with the kind of intellect that Roger Reeves displays in his debut, King Me, often runs the risk of insularity and in-speak to the point of exclusion: through literary or cultural allusions, technical jargon or prohibitively challenging diction, big-brained poetry often leaves full-hearted readers with too little blood to keep upright. Reeves’ poetry, though, is as emotionally riveting as it is intelligent: an incredibly rare feature in the landscape of contemporary poetics. And it’s this stunning emotional force that keeps Reeves’ poems thoroughly accessible. Like Whitman’s, Reeves’ project is the very opposite of exclusion, and the means by which he keeps his brain from blocking the reader’s view is by moving his feet expertly among a vast crowd of recognizable witnesses. This is fundamentally a peopled poetry, and the range of people to whom it speaks is rivaled in scope only by the range of people of whom it [...]

First card: Seven of Cups The Record of Coco Charbonneau July 25th, 1949, The Black Forest Sara la Kali, stretch your black wings around me— If I am no one, inscribe me with purpose. If I am someone, speak it to me. I will believe anything you tell me. My dear, sweet once upon a time…. In The Black Forest, I stand over the man who I’ve hated most in the world, the man who is now bound and gagged at my feet, his balding head bruised by the butt of the MAC-50 semiautomatic pistol that’s pointed at his third eye, and I need to decide whether or not I am a person capable of ending another human life. I know that I am Coco Charbonneau, nineteen years old, burlesque dancer and fortune teller at Zenith Circus in Paris, but that’s just a dress I wear, and when I take [...]

Notes from a Time Traveller’s Journal: Wallflower. Mixed media. Bio: MANDEM is the art name shared by Maize Arendsee (an art instructor and Studio Art MFA student at Florida State University) and her life-partner, Moco Steinman-Arendsee. Drawing on an academic background in classical mythology, gender studies, and critical theory, MANDEM works across media and materials (painting, assemblage/collage, film, sculpture, and book-making), intentionally destabilizing genre in terms of content and media. MANDEM has received numerous art awards, including Juror’s Merit at the LaGrange National XXVII (2014) and First Place at the FSU Museum of Fine Art Summer Annual Exhibition (2014). While being widely published and nationally exhibited, MANDEM remains actively involved in the Tallahassee art scene. (www.MythpunkArt.com) Artist Statement: We are a transdigital artist. Our art is an exercise in categorical violations, simulation, and narrative (translation: we are makers, rule-breakers, tricksters, and storytellers). We work across media and materials: painting, assemblage/collage, [...]