Poet Alex Bucik’s “A Hospitable World” denaturalizes the familiar by revealing the “work / of the same invisible hand / that plants the public gardens every spring / and kills the vagrants in their sleep.”
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All articles filed in Protean Magazine
Elves in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Lyta Gold examines the fairy-tale figure of the elf. Recurring in separate cultures—in fiction, in folklore, and in symbology—elves signify far more than the fantastical.
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Erasing Tejas
Poet Sebastián H. Páramo’s “Erasing Tejas” explores displacement and dispossession throughout Texas history, set against a backdrop of ongoing climate catastrophe.
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Dead Man Running
“If anything, Levon Manzie seemed to campaign harder after he died.” Ryan Zickgraf reports from Mobile, AL with the story of an attempt to elect a deceased councilman: a racist plot to make the largely Black city majority-white.
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ALL THE TV SHOWS ARE ABOUT COPS
To thank our new Patrons, we’re republishing an incredible poem from our third print issue: Hanif Abdurraqib’s “ALL THE TV SHOWS ARE ABOUT COPS.”
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Review: Exterminate All the Brutes and How To Become a Tyrant
Two docu-series, “Exterminate All the Brutes” and “How to Become a Tyrant,” exemplify a “poetic” materialism and stale liberal idealism, respectively. Ilan Benattar holds them both up to the light.
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lying in my bed I hear the clock tick and think of you
Eugenia Zuroski’s poem, “lying in my bed I hear the clock tick and think of you,” meditates on the uses of poetry in apocalyptic times: “the answer is other people, the answer is fuck art.”
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Trees and Other Abolitionist Allies
Why do trees reduce violence? How can urban design reinscribe—or alleviate—inequality? Amelie Daigle writes on the structural racism of infrastructure.
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Why we’re asking for your support.
The editors fill you in on the magazine’s solvency, our plans for the future, and why we could use your help on Patreon to help sustain our operations.
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PROTECT YOUR FAMILY FROM LEAD IN YOUR HOME
Poet Amalia Tenuta’s “PROTECT YOUR FAMILY FROM LEAD IN YOUR HOME” is a searing critique of neocolonial violence in the US, a country “where settlers dredged the closeted cannibal curiosity / of private property.”
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