An independent, ad-free leftist magazine of critical essays, poetry, fiction, and art.
Amid increasing state violence against workers and pueblos originarios in Peru, we present an excerpt from Peruvian poet Valeria Román Marroquín’s collection ANA C. BUENA (La Balanza Editorial, 2021), translated into English for the first time by Noah Mazer.
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Poet Jake Romm’s “Lamentations” grieves the inadequacy of revolutionary poetry while maintaining the necessity of revolution: “A poem,” he writes, “is a failure / To fulfill the promise of poetry.”
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Poet Kurt Ostrow’s “Minor Deities” infuses the nonhuman world with the spirit of emancipatory politics.
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Sudip Bhattacharya’s poem “AAPI Month” asks us to remember, amid the pandemic’s enduring brutalities, the achievements of Vietnam’s anticolonial struggle.
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In “The Red Telephone,” poet Kyle Carrero Lopez explores post-revolutionary Cuba as a sovereign force in Cold War politics, its “missile-shaped shadow” looming over both Washington and Moscow.
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Matthew J. Seidel reviews Road to Nowhere, the new book from Paris Marx on fantastical and farcical big-tech transit schemes and how they have substituted for the public good.
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In this essay from Protean’s third print issue, now online, Kimberly Bain reflects on grief and memory: on the still-resonating echoes of Emmett Till’s death and his mother’s cry, on Nina Simone, on Black mourning across historical time.
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Samuel McIlhagga interviews Richard Seymour, author of The Disenchanted Earth, on socialism and degrowth, the ecofascist threat, and envisioning a planetary, humanist “re-enchantment.”
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Brianna DiMonda shares creative nonfiction from the perspective of a narrator who has undergone a routine abortion—attesting to the fact that, discomfort notwithstanding, the procedure is an inestimably crucial right.
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With an eye to Orwell’s “The Road to Wigan Pier,” Samuel McIlhagga writes on the class codes of British diction and the incestuous tangle of the U.K. elite, who preside over a hidebound power structure and decaying institutions.
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