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Protean Magazine

Protean Magazine

An independent, ad-free leftist magazine of critical essays, poetry, fiction, and art.

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  • About Us
  • Online Features
    • Critique
    • News
    • Fiction
    • Poetry
    • Reviews
    • Interviews
  • Print Editions
    • Volume I, Issue II: Anti-Sisyphus
    • Volume I, Issue I: Pattern Machines
  • Podcast
  • Store
    • Shop
    • Cart
    • Checkout
  • Submissions
  • Support Us

Illyric Elegy #10 [“The doctor told me she would never speak”]

By: Protean Magazine January 22, 2021
Poetry

by Mathilda Cullen. The doctor told me she would never speak / to me again. “I can’t believe I have you,” she said to me. / It was a miracle, a communism collapsing speech altogether.

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Poetry

Why We Strike

By: Protean Magazine January 21, 2021January 21, 2021
Critique

by C.M. Lewis. Worker militancy and the labor movement are in the public eye in a way not seen in decades. In the past three years, workers have struck—at times illegally—in huge numbers, especially in the education sector.

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Critique

The Capitol Was Stormed Long Ago

By: Protean Magazine January 15, 2021
Critique, News

by Shane Burley. There are key flashpoints that define the Trump years. The escalator speech. The “total and complete shutdown.” Charlottesville. But these were not qualitatively dissimilar from the bulk of his Presidential term, during which racism and violence became ubiquitous.

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Critique, News

Against Testing

By: Protean Magazine January 12, 2021January 12, 2021
Critique

by KJ Shepherd. The U.S. education system has long wedded itself to an entire industry of standardized social sorting, which leads students to see themselves as a quantifiable commodity from an early age and, eventually, to borrow against their future.

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Critique

2020: Year in Review

By: Protean Magazine December 31, 2020December 31, 2020
Announcements

Protean was honored to feature the work of dozens of talented writers, poets, and artists this year, both in print and online. Here’s a selection of our publications from 2020.

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Announcements

Her Socialist Smile is a Portrait of a Woman Misremembered

By: Protean Magazine December 23, 2020December 23, 2020
Reviews

by Amelia Merrill. Socialism was not a niche part of Keller’s life, but the crux of it. As a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, she called for nationwide workers’ strikes and revolution, bemoaning that her fans and benefactors wanted to sanitize her image.

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Reviews

Blood Red Lines: An Interview with Brendan O’Connor

By: Protean Magazine December 17, 2020December 17, 2020
Interviews

Brendan O’Connor: I came to writing about the far right during the occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in 2016. I was working at Gawker at the time, and there were already people covering the story, so I had to look around for other angles in because I really felt like there’s something very strange going on here.

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Interviews

Loom

By: Protean Magazine December 8, 2020
Poetry

by Stephanie Cawley. A machine weaves cloth / so a woman can write / a poem. The machine weaves / so one woman can write

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Poetry

The Origins of Cling Wrap

By: Protean Magazine December 4, 2020December 15, 2020
Fiction

by ish ibrahim. See Kyoko now, on a white roof with white plaster, pipes like candy canes jutting out, sealed at their base with white plaster. See the pipes spewing mysterious white smoke. There is a blue sky with occasional white clouds.

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Fiction

You Can Only Watch

By: Protean Magazine November 25, 2020December 15, 2020
Critique

by M.K. Anderson. There’s a meme going around based on the old philosophical thought experiment of the trolley problem. Instead of branching trolley tracks—one track with people tied to it, one without, and a man at the switch—it’s just one track with a trolley running over a long line of victims.

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Critique

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