By trying to occupy, with brutal military force, its imagined imperial heartland, the Russian Federation initiated a destructive process that may lead to the gradual loss of many more regions and peoples still subjected to its colonial rule. Of course, Ukrainians will fight against Russian imperialist frenzy by any means whatsoever. But merely fighting back is not enough.

Given that the war is inexplicable in strategic terms, to understand the war we don’t need to think geopolitically, but rather psycho-pathologically. Perhaps we need a geopolitics of psychotic outbursts.

Maybe there are other ways of overcoming modernity that remain important for us today. War is not the most desirable thing, though it is always a possibility as long as the sovereign state remains the only reality of international politics, since sovereignty presupposes the possibility of war.

Within the shared sociohistorical field of black cultural practice, within the neglected realms of the studium, homogeneity and heterogeneity are instead bound up in shifting but complementary relation. In this model, repetition and differentiation are not antagonistically opposed. Difference is not exclusionary, and similitude is not unprepossessing.

The genocide of relation can never be traced back, quite. Relation cannot be propertied. What is lost cannot be parsed.

In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein describes how when a crisis happens, companies infiltrate society, and the government imposes new rules or cuts. It’s sometimes more possible in the art sector to see individuals, groups, and collectives using these moments to infiltrate the structure that is in crisis or that claims the crisis.

To grapple with land and its histories is to rediscover life as a weapon. Only a weapon so total is powerful enough to combat the combined spiritual and ecological devastation of our time.

She read the piece of paper pinned to the wall—a list of terms and principles. Anyone can petrify here. No one will be collected or labeled an artwork. People deserve access to spaces like this. Petrification is a human right.

Upend came out in the spring of 2020, and became my companion across the rest of that evil year. The book telegraphs nothing while working through layers of complex feeling and revelation. You have to read every word to get to know it.

Etel Adnan’s voice, her vision, her generosity; above all her ability to find wonderment in the world without ever turning a blind eye to injustice: she will be truly missed.

Akilah Oliver’s meditation on resistance is profoundly disinterested in forlorn hope, actively disavowing progress, mocking utopian happy futures. Against these false roads, she offers “the ability to live in faith,” a practical metaphysics, a poetics of necessity alchemized in a kiss, dignified and erotic—traits of every Oliver poem. 

In Thresholes, Lara Mimosa Montes writes: “Consciousness floated away. I could not catch up. / ○ / That’s what makes it narrative.” I am struck by this line, an articulation of what an account of the self can be after loss, losses, in a book that embodies a poetics of uncertainty.

Over the past two years, I’ve heard no single poem with more frequency than “The Hiss.” It’s a cut-up earworm chant, an incantation written by the fictional character Alan Wake. The poem invades the Federal Bureau of Control in the AAA game Control. Pure pandemic media, the poem transmits via viral infection.

For a poet to write a life, she must first write half a life, then half a half a life, and so on, ad infinitum. The modern solution to this ancient paradox is velocity. The poet has written poems containing more than seems possible.