In the cultural moment before Giorno, poetry was largely relegated to bohemian circles and college campuses. Radical figures like Allen Ginsberg occasionally surfaced in pop culture, but much American poetry at the time seemed staid. Giorno, perhaps more than anyone else, reconfigured poetry in the image of rock music. In his hands, poetry became sexual, performative, and dangerous—a polymorphous art that looked to the future rather than to the past. You can debate whether it was good to have poets on MTV in the 1980s and ‘90s; you can’t debate it was remarkable for them to be there at all.
The success of audiobooks need not come at the expense of any other format, but rather it feels like we are all recognising that a good story, well told, is a balm in these fractious days, however it finds its way into our heads and however many times we’ve read it.
Our family is like a closed-circuit Indian Food Channel, one that I can directly relate to much more than any recent Indian reality show on Netflix. Together we prepare other family favorite dishes, like potato chops, a dish my late grandmother (Jeanette's mother) made from mashed potato cutlets stuffed with minced beef (or vegetables.) This prep-intensive dish, that many of us avoided for its inconvenience, we now did with intent, even happiness.
A cheese is just one small piece of the world—one lump of microbe-riddled milk curds—but each is an endpoint of centuries of tradition. Some disappear for months or years; others never return. The cheesemonger and writer Ned Palmer told me that, when a cheese is lost, “Your grief reaches back into the past—into decades and centuries and millennia of culture. You feel all of that.”
Jerkins makes plain that denying space for Black identities in history is itself a legacy as American as its original sins of racism and enslavement. By exploring the truth of that past with such integrity, this memoir enriches our future.
I said trouble. I meant summer. I can’t wait
For summer to be over. Just because you’re