Category: landscape

this soft, open witnessing of all that is well

The hand of politics is so visible from their vantage point that they don’t know how they could have missed it at first. It’s utterly manifest in every detail of the view

a planet contoured and landscaped by want

Samantha Harvey

earth works

thick brown mud

clinging pulling

a body down

hear wounded earth cry

bequeath to me

the hoe the hope

ancestral rights

to turn the ground over

to shovel and sift

until history

rewritten resurrected

returns to its rightful owners

a past to claim

yet another stone lifted to

throw against the enemy

making way for new endings

random seeds

spreading over the hillside

wild roses

come by fierce wind and hard rain

unleashed furies

here in this untouched wood

a dirge a lamentation

for earth to live again

earth that is all at once a grave

a resting place a bed of new beginnings

avalanche of splendor

4., bell hooks. Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

I tasted—careless—then—
I did not know the Wine
Came once a World—Did you?

Emily Dickinson

Style also indexes constraint: we make art ((or history)(KM)), but not in conditions of our choosing. Kornbluh

This morning there ain’t nothing I can’t do.

This is my territory, I know all of it—

Aubade: East, Rita Dove. Playlist for the Apocalypse: Poems.

When the present seems to have abandoned the future, we need to observe the here and now more closely. These artists’ works are clear and detached, analytically precise and calm to present the state of affairs right now in all its complexity. In doing so, they undermine and refuse to comply with an omnipresent immediacy that manifests itself in the form of accelerated availability, speed, consumability, and instant legibility. Defying powerlessness and paralysis, the works address contemporary wars and their economic and political implications, dealing with climate change and socioeconomic power structures in various societies. Yet they invariably retain an awareness not only of our planetary present being permanently and repeatedly reconfigured from assorted constructions of the Real but also of the extent to which we are part of it all.

UNDERMINING THE IMMEDIACY curated by Susanne Pfeffer and Julia Eichler. MMK Frankfurt.

Perhaps what we’re all looking for, …

though beautiful, was untenable in the long term.

the more beautiful the setting, the purer the horror.

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, translated from the french by Lara Vergnaud

What makes “Good Girl” so powerful as a novel of development or bildungsroman is that it respects self-destruction as an effective tool of self-discovery.
[…]
In her wild behavior, her pursuit of chaotic situations and turbulent relationships, there is exhilaration with a purpose. She is cutting ties with safety to fling herself into life.

Nersessian reviews “Good Girl,” by the German-born writer Aria Aber.