Author’s Note: This essay contains descriptions of racial and domestic violence. “Modernity’s endless technoscientific entanglements of blood and race are the zenith of vampire culture. It’s a history of blood spilt in the name of bloodlines…Modernity is the Age of Vampires — as much as it’s an age of undead…

Author’s Note: This essay contains spoilers for Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon, both the books and the TV adaptation. Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe once remarked that “a chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier.” It’s a surprising, provocative consideration: that chairs…

The concert begins with a piano. The piano might be black or brown or, in one instance, green. It’s never situated on a stage, rather in the middle of the room where the audience can see the instrument from all sides. The performance begins. …

Anna Funder’s Stasiland was not the book I had originally intended to buy. Yet, that nagging feeling in my gut persisted with such intensity after that I returned back to the feminist bookstore I got it from and exchanged it. I’m embarrassed to say that it was the cover that…

“Angels are unthinkable / in hot weather,” — Monica Youn, ‘A Parking Lot in West Houston’ The story goes like this: the Sackett and Wilhelms Lithography & Printing Company was struggling to keep the humidity levels in their production rooms low. Their paper was warping from all the moisture in…

“What’s a person to us / but a contortion / of pressure ridges / palpable / long after she is gone?” — Rae Armantrout, ‘Missing Persons’ “Apparently even the most awful tragedies, and the people they’d ruined, got a little stale after a while.” — Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers The…

Colette’s Living Environment (1972–1983) — “she thinks, the material and the dream can join,” — ‘Dreamwood,’ Adrienne Rich, Poetry Magazine, 1987 In 1972, after seeing an old parachute as someone’s apartment decor, Colette Lumiere (then known only as Colette) began stapling found fabric to the ceilings, walls, and floors of her Pearl Street loft. A…

Her earliest memory was not of human faces, the touch of a parent, or even the plush hand of a doll. No, her first memory of the material world would be that of a doorway. …

Act I — 12:08 pm Like visiting a museum gallery on a weekday morning or a cemetery in the off-season, only those most loyal, most spurred with sudden agitation cut through the garbage-pimpled alleyways, past hungry crowds collecting around cafe doors and impatient dogs waiting outside grocery stories, to surrender…