Yet today, a new generation of artists, both rappers and poets, are consciously forging closer kinship between the genres. They draw from a common toolbox of language, use the same social media platforms to reach their audiences and respond to the same economic and political provocations to create public art. In doing so, rappers and the poets who claim affinity with them are resuscitating a body of literary practices mostly neglected in poetry during the 20th century. These ghost appendages of form — repetition, patterned rhythm and, above all, rhyme — thrive in song, especially in rap.
But the story of rap and poetry’s reunion is as much about people as it is about language.
Nearly a hundred pages arranged in 22 stacks of varying thickness reached from one wall of my apartment to the other. Lorde’s “Hard Feelings / Loveless” played from the bluetooth speaker on my bookshelf. I tried to pinch back tears—mostly of frustration and doubt—and failed.
Novels (or any other longform project) ask that writers hold multiple, disparate things in our minds at once, not only over days but over weeks, months, and years. Every time we step away from our book there’s the danger we’re going to lose track of one or more of these threads and the project will lose its energy, its will to exist. So when my writer friends and I quiz each other about time, what we’re really trying to get at is a question that’s always been fundamental to writing a novel, but that feels like an absolute imperative to writing one right now: How do you keep a novel alive when it keeps trying to die?
News organizations have long argued that “bearing witness” to conflicts, famines, and natural disasters is an ethical imperative, even when it means placing reporters and photographers in dangerous situations. (The cynical add that we are perfectly capable of looking at other people’s tragedies without feeling obliged to ameliorate them.) “News photography is what brings a story to the world, and news photography is all about access,” Rickey Rogers, the global head of pictures at the Reuters news agency, told me. “When everyone is running away from a war or an explosion, journalists are running towards it.”
But covering an infectious disease has changed the risk calculus. “One of the biggest changes to photographers is that instead of going out to cover something that involves risk and coming home to a safe place, they’re bringing that danger home with them,” Rogers said. “We have photographers that have access to ICUs, but we don’t want them to have hours in there. Every minute is a greater risk.”
Restaurant workers and owners, along with foodies and community activists, are wondering what will survive of the Chinatown dining experience: the grease-blotted lazy Susans, the pungent smells, the Chinese-only menu for insiders, the orange slices and fortune cookies. When the pandemic finally subsides, how many of the restaurants that embodied Chinatown’s plebeian cuisine will be left standing?
In the beginning, “there was a temptation to be like, ‘Oh, it’s a puppet,’” Smith says. “But that was just really dissatisfying for me.” She worried about the effect an unfinished hem could have on a young fan. “In their mind, especially kids, the minute they look in the Muppets’ eyes they think they’re talking to a real thing,” she says. “I didn’t want it to be on my watch that they become distracted and realize that isn’t the case.”
More intimate in setting than The Sympathizer's transcontinental scope, The Committed employs the motif of organized crime as linkage between the various demimondes populated by disaffected Algerian immigrants, maternal Cambodian prostitutes, and nostalgic Vietnamese thugs all living in France. From a satirical James Bond-esque spy story in The Sympathizer, the author shifts to James Baldwin's intersectional politics in The Committed to address greed, prejudice, and violence.
Like Helen Garner and Christos Tsiolkas’ own debuts, Bedford’s is more concerned with taking the pulse of young, artistically-minded people alive and struggling through the city’s struggle, slipping and sinking through the every-nothing days of urban anomie and insecure work and relationships. In this, her echelon is us – the young, the hopeful, the precarious. The ever-present “I”.
Through one subzero Minnesota winter and the spring and sweltering summer that follow, the unnamed narrator of Jackie Polzin’s wondrous first novel, “Brood,” does nothing you’d expect would make for an exciting read: She thinks about baking brownies (but doesn’t), thinks about bickering with her husband (but doesn’t), thinks about cleaning the bathroom (and does), visits her mother, mourns a miscarriage, babysits a friend’s child and lies in bed in the morning “listening to the sharp pops of the house as it shifted.”
Don’t think
you have to speak
of the snow, branches
bent, weak