Often, when we Americans leap into a discussion about “free speech” — a phrase that has become so over-stretched that it’s ceased to mean much of anything – we find ourselves responding with belly-rubbing complacency: “Ah, things sure are bad over there, (too bad, too bad), but fortunately we are over here.” Nod, nod, end of paragraph
“We’re So Lucky” by M. LYNX QUALEY
Dzhokhar is my neighbor. I might have waited in line behind him at CVS. We might have exchanged a glance of droll amusement passing through rush-hour traffic on Mass. Ave. He conceivably could have caught the T with me every day, and I just never realized it.
By 9:00 a.m. on Friday, any pretense I had of going to work had vanished, as MEMA ordinance required Cambridge residents to shelter in place. I’d woken up three hours earlier to a text from my dad: “Mass transit closed. OK?” As I resigned myself to the commentators of Boston Public Radio, I quickly became privy to their frustrations—repeated ad nauseam, increasingly bothersome to me—about the commonplace and unremarkable appearances of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects. “They look so normal.” “They look just like us.”
Apparently, this was a cause for shock and disappointment.
Notes From Lockdown, Ten Minutes from Norfolk Street in Cambridge by James Flaherty
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Cities burn, favelas rot, the starving walk for water,
elections are rigged and revolutions hijacked,
tanks are deployed against the people—but
here the children walk with lanterns
along the lane between the grocery and the château,
they babble past the church, they know the life to come
is this moment, this one, this one, and this,
here—catch! They are the life to come
elections are rigged and revolutions hijacked,
tanks are deployed against the people—but
here the children walk with lanterns
they babble past the church, they know the life to come
is this moment, this one, this one, and this,
here—catch! They are the life to come
Swiss National Day in Lavigny by Michael Hulse
2
Brad Richard is a man obsessed. Obsessed with paintings, obsessed with drawings, obsessed with photography. And it’s not just art objects themselves that Richard is obsessed with, but also what happened to them before, during, and after they were made. His poems poke around artists’ studios, examine their brushes, get under their cameras’ hoods. From multiple formal angles, Richard contrasts art from the nineteenth-century with his family history in Texas and Louisiana and with Hurricane Katrina, drawing us into the relationship between creating images and meaning. It’s Richard’s thoughtful, wide-ranging intelligence that holds Motion Studies together as he asks questions about the roles and responsibilities of the artist when portraying moments of suffering.
On Art and Katrina: Brad Richard’s Motion Studies by Joelle Biele
2
David Madden’s thirteenth book of fiction is a daringly imagined mythology of London Bridge—its conception by Peter de Colechurch, its construction, its meaning in history, both metaphorical and literal, and its core relevance to Great Britain and its empire. Madden begins his work with a two-page preface, To My Reader, in which he describes his research, calling the work a “meditative narrative,” and ends his remarks by addressing the reader in a direct plea for collaboration and by a fervent avowal: “I trust you.
“A Thought Turned to Stone”: David Madden’s London Bridge in Plague and Fire by Gerald Duff
(via quotesfromfiction)
From the jungle they watch her, but she doesn’t know this. She sits on the third-story verandah with her monkey, Don Sergio de Ferdinand, who fiddles with her birthstone. Sergio spits apple and leaps into the branches of a nearby tree. The vines twisting up the lattice are still wet. Daily showers followed by sun and wind gusts—rain that dries soon after it finishes. She reaches for an ink pen, trying to steady her hands.
Dear Cousin by Tara Goedjen
(Source: jordiexx-wattpad, via quotesfromfiction)
Every year on a particular Thursday in April, a crew of KR Associates roll out of bed early in the morning to hang poems on Kenyon College’s campus as the sun rises.
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