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.
January 30, 2019
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...
October 30, 2018
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—
October 30, 2018
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...
October 01, 2018
The phrase "Santa Fe women" calls to mind a range of women throughout history...
August 28, 2018
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.”...
July 30, 2018
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...
May 01, 2018
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 ...
April 11, 2018
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...
April 01, 2018
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…
March 15, 2018
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...
February 22, 2018
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...
February 01, 2018
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....
February 01, 2018
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?"...
January 18, 2018
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...
January 02, 2018
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...
December 14, 2017
I am both of these women. The first one opens the living room drapes, sees it happening, and screams for her husband. He doesn’t answer. She slaps the palm of her hand against the glass pane over and over again until her hand throbs. She isn’t thinking straight...
December 01, 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...
December 01, 2017
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) ...
November 07, 2017
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...
November 01, 2017
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 ...
October 01, 2017
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. [...]
September 01, 2017
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 [...]
September 01, 2017
Daniel Bohnhorst lives in Santa Fe. He works at op.cit. books and the Violin Shop of Santa Fe. [...]
August 01, 2017
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, [...]
August 01, 2017
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 [...]
July 01, 2017
“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
April 01, 2017
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...
February 01, 2017
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...
February 01, 2017
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.
December 01, 2016
