Book Review: A Treatise on Stars by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's A Treatise on Stars, the latest book by the New Mexico-based poet, makes a case for communication with star beings.
Nov 16
Literary
Apr 30
Sunbeams 99¢: Friends of the Orphan Signs
FeatureNew MexicoVol. 2 Flights of Fancy
For the past ten years, Friends of the Orphan Signs has been placing small moments of wonder on empty, abandoned, and suspended-in-time signs that anchor Albuquerque to its past as a stop along Route 66.
Jan 28
In A Modern Rendering – The Color Woodcuts of Gustave Baumann
Born in Germany in 1881, Baumann’s parents moved to Chicago when he was ten, and the budding artist began attending the School of the Art Institute in his teens, at one of its most fecund and influential periods. Baumann wasn’t the first of his Chicago peers to discover New Mexico, but he planted deeper roots than most. Fellow master printmaker and Baumann’s soul-heir Tom Leech contributes a heartfelt reflection on decades spent working with the artist’s materials, upholding his legacy at Santa Fe’s Palace of the Governors...
Aug 28
Aug 01
What Pain Can Do
About the pain. I’ll first describe it clinically, as if I were a camera. I began to sweat everywhere after a flash of heat lit my skin (the whole organ). I lost the ability or will to control the movement of my eyes, which rolled around the room. My eyes also streamed tears, though my face lacked the grimaces and spasms which normally accompany them. Finally, I moaned.
Jul 26
New Mexico Women: Natalie Goldberg
Natalie Goldberg, author of "Writing Down the Bones," made New Mexico her home and the center of her writing practice fifty years ago.
Jun 26
Writings: Medallions
After planting and harvesting crops for over forty years, you would think a being might finally comprehend the ephemeral nature of all things. Not, alas, this one. At least not within my deep inner recesses, in the private folds of knowing...
May 24
Writings + The Printed Page
John Shepherd’s pack weighed him down, straps cutting into fleece, water bottle digging into his hip. The hike had taken longer than he’d anticipated. The light was fading...
Apr 26
Jan 30
Interview with Poet Joy Harjo
I still feel like a New Mexico writer in part, an important part, and my plans are to secure a little place there to live at least part of the time...New Mexico inspires me as no other place. I consider it the birthplace of my poetry, though of course, my poetry was set in place for generations, through all the speakers, singers, and artists in my ancestral lines.
Oct 30
David Hammons: Bliz-aard Ball Sale by Elena Filipovic
February 1983: a man in coat and scarf stands on a sidewalk among various street vendors at Cooper Square in downtown New York City. At his feet, a collection of perfectly spherical white forms...
Oct 30
The Fish in the Trees
The leaves in the trees, one night—more leaves than there are stars in the sky, more leaves than there are eyes to look up at the night sky to see them with—
Oct 01
I Heard it Was the War
All this madness has made me terribly sad. I didn't buy the diet pills because they were too expensive. Or perhaps, that's life. The world tells you for so long...
Aug 28
Mary Hunter Austin
The phrase "Santa Fe women" calls to mind a range of women throughout history...
Jul 30
Curatorial Activism
On April 1, 2014, the editors at ArtSlant reported that MoMA would “give the museum over exclusively to women artists for the entire year of 2015.”...
May 01
Interview with Colson Whitehead
In the late '80s and early '90s, Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning novelist Colson Whitehead and New Yorker Poetry Editor Kevin Young were a couple of kids at Harvard. They became friends long before either had a writing career to speak of, but in Whitehead's words...
Apr 11
April Reading
When Jenny George read from her collection The Dream of Reason at Collected Works in early April, her voice was soft, slow, and steady. Like her poems, her reading rendered heartbreaking compressions of language and feeling into something delicate to behold. Her images ...
Apr 01
Everything I Lost in the Flood: Essays on Pictures, Language and Code
For fans of Laurie Anderson, and I certainly count myself as one, the book Everything I Lost in the Flood archives her forty-plus-year art career, beginning with a 1974 performance piece called Duets on Ice. This work, even in its simplicity, constellates a certain inscrutable...
Mar 15
March 2018 Reading
Winter in the northern Midwest is not a place I return to in person, at least not willingly. It is a place I dread for its deadly overcast sadness, a dread that, I learned from Michigan poet Emily Van Kley's collection, constitutes its own heady nostalgia. The Cold and the Rust…
Feb 22
February 2018 Reading
Calling herself a "visual artist who writes," author Verónica Gerber Bicecci approaches fiction from the conceptual and the personal simultaneously: What does it mean, logically, for a person to be missing? And how does it feel? Bicecci incorporates line drawings throughout Empty...
Feb 01
3 Questions: Aleksandar Hemon
In the last year, Aleksandar Hemon’s writings in response to the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the perils of Trumpism have served as my touchstones, pieces I bookmark and return to and share when I’m feeling especially low, especially unable to proceed. Hemon is a Chicago-based...
Feb 01
Two Poems from Ruins of Modernity
Kate Ingold is a visual artist and poet working in a variety of media. In her work, she examines issues of disturbance, reparation, and collapse, and the nostalgia and regret that can accompany loss....
Jan 18
January 2018 Reading
Zadie Smith is the reason I left Facebook. As I was reading—actually, as my partner, who snatched it up the moment it arrived, was reading—her new collection of essays Feel Free, I revisited a piece of hers I remember from several years ago to see if it held up. "Generation Why?"...
IAIA Winter Readers Gathering
Each January, as Santa Fe et environs settle back into their quiet winter ways following the bustle of holidays, markets, and festivals, the Low Residency MFA program in Creative Writing gathers at IAIA for a week of workshops and unforgettable public readings. This is the only...
Dec 14
December Reading: Three Titles from 2017
As a difficult year winds to a close, I’ve been thinking about what books made a difference for me in 2017. What changed my mind, or opened it, or gave me language to understand and express the present moment? Here are three 2017 titles that made me see things in a new way...
Dec 01
Dec 01
THE Best Books 2017
Each year, we ask The Magazine’s contributors to pick their favorite recent (or recently relevant) books to recommend for your holiday-season reading. Read on for their suggestions...
Nov 07
November Book Reviews
Jenn Shapland reviews three recent book releases: The Glass Eye by Jeannie Vanasco (nonfiction), Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado (fiction), and For Want of Water: And Other Poems by Sasha Pimentel (poetry) ...
Nov 01
Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay In Forty Questions
Sometimes a writer’s subject finds her. Valeria Luiselli, a novelist and essayist from Mexico City, was waiting for her green card when she and her niece started working as interpreters at the New York immigration court. Luiselli had heard from her own immigration lawyer that after...
Oct 01
New Releases: One Sentence Book Reviews
New fall book released in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry are reviewed with one sentence and one quotation of each from Jenn Shapland. Titles include The Dark Dark by Samantha Hunt, Katalin Street by Magda Szabo, The Mountain by Paul Yoon, Letters to his Neighbor by Marcel Proust ...
Sep 01
Louise Lawler: Receptions
Louise Lawler has spent her career effacing any presence of her own identity in her artworks. Her works themselves are often either mechanically produced or feature the work of other artists. [...]
Sep 01
Doris Cross: Selected Works
En route from one Southwest Arts Oasis to another, determined to see the works of Doris Cross (1907-1994) in Marfa and carrying a friend's artwork in our trunk, we passed through the heart of darkness [...]
Aug 01
Aug 01
Layli Long Soldier: WHEREAS
At the heart of Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS lie two apologies. One comes from the poet’s father for his drinking and his absence during her childhood. This apology, [...]
Jul 01
Openings: A Memoir from the Women’s Art Movement, New York City 1970-1992
While she was planning Views by Women Artists, a massive collaborative exhibition in 1982 during the annual College Art Association conference, Sabra Moore’s own show, Pieced [...]
Apr 01
Matriz del Sol
“C C’s house!” they’d chime at any abandoned alpine shack or desert ruin, / Though 50 years passed before she drove the 3 mph road off Hwy 14 between Cerrillos and Madrid
Feb 01
Mary Dezember: Still Howling
Mary Dezember: Still Howling: When I walked in to Mary Dezember’s reading for Still Howling, upstairs from the plaza in a snug gallery space run by Strangers Collective, the poet came up to me and immediately connected me with something I’d written, something about women, she said...
Feb 01
A Neverending Story: Finnegans Wake in the Information Age
The music plays. Suddenly the words feel right. It makes perfect sense. The Norse god Odin is crossing a rainbow bridge into the castle in heaven. That's one way of reading it at least. The recording switches off. Discussion resumes. A college professor hovers over a giant textbook...
Dec 01
The Magazine’s Best Books 2016: Staff Picks Edition
Each year, THE Magazine curates a list of the year's best art books. This year we've asked our contributors for their recent favorite arts reading materials. The results ranged from exhibition catalogues to memoirs, artist books to artists' writings.
Dec 01
Twice Through the Maze
In nightmarish political times, it’s important to keep in mind that books are more than just objects, and that the pen is always, always mightier than the sword. Pay attention to who’s reading books and who is not, to who is making them and who is burning them...
