A Website of the Radical Imagination
About Benj Demott When Ta-Nehisi Coates was trying to make sense of the world as a young student, his first working theory “held all black people as kings in exile, a nation of original men severed from our original names and our majestic Nubian culture.” With help from teachers at Howard, Coates thought his way out of compensatory … Read more
P.W. Singer and August Cole have just published Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War. They seem to have a lot in common: both have B.A.s and advanced degrees from various Ivies, both seem admirably well-connected in the think tanks and a number of adjacent worlds, both possess what seem to be glittering … Read more
In memory of the failed Cuban Revolution, 1956-2014 A look which always bears (like a wounded bird) tenderness—from Che’s last poem, written to his wife, Aleida, shortly before his death Before he was “Comandante Segundo,” the raving and homicidal (also: suicidal, but all violence against others flows from a rerouting of the subterranean channels of … Read more
1. “We Left the U.S. We Chose Chile.” In Chile, the settler-colonialist project of extermination and subjugation (a project driven from its beginning by a “native” oligarchy in a mistrustful and protean alliance with multinational capital) has always depended upon the sizable vanguard presence of colorful psychopaths, questing gringo monadological personalities, Melvillean isolates hurtling with … Read more
Roxane Beth Johnson’s first book of poetry, Jubilee, won the Philip Levine Award for Poetry and was published by Anhinga Press. In awarding the prize, Levine commented: “These luminous poems depict a world I never knew—or knew as a child and since forgot—and they do so with the authority of a totally mature voice. The … Read more
People who speak Spanish all have outside jobs, my daughter announces as the Mow ‘n Blow crew descend from a truck to ravish our lawn. I read her a book about dark children dancing, playing drums with wrinkled elders, eating fried plantains. Bored, she grabs Dr. Seuss. I’m not Latin Mommy. I’m light pink like … Read more
Thomas Geoghegan, Only One Thing Can Save Us: Why America Needs a New Kind of Labor Movement (The New Press 2014) Thomas Geoghegan has devoted his life’s work to the defense and advancement of the American labor movement. The author of seven books, the most well-known his first,Which Side Are You On: Trying To Be … Read more