Category: Current

[spacer height=”0.1px”]Daniel Barbiero March 2026 [spacer height=”20px”] Susan Lewis As In As If Antiphony Press [spacer height=”20px”] Mallarmé famously compared language to a worn coin passed from hand to hand in silence. We know why the coin is worn: it’s part of the currency, a token of exchange that’s changed hands any number of times… Continue reading Susan Lewis: “As In As If”

[spacer height=”0.1px”]James Mesiti March 2026 [spacer height=”20px”] Useless Science or The Alchemist Remedios Varo, 1955 Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City [spacer height=”20px”] Philadelphia, a city forced to lubricate its streetlights when its sports teams win; where 10,000 jesters parade down its main avenue on New Year’s Day (does anyone know what a mummer really… Continue reading 
Surreal Jawn – A Review of “Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100”


[spacer height=”20px”]   Untitled from “The Edges” series, oil on canvas, 100 x 100 cm, 2025 [spacer height=”30px”] Amirhossein Bayani in conversation with Ayda Roozbayani, October 15, 2025 [spacer height=”30px”] Amirhossein Bayani: In nearly all of the bodies of work I’ve seen from you in recent years, there seems to be a recurring reference to… Continue reading Amirhossein Bayani converses with Ayda Roozbayani

[spacer height=”0.1px”]Daniel Barbiero February 2026 [spacer height=”20px”] The Carbonized Earth: A Study on Arthur Rimbaud Paul Stubbs Black Herald Press [spacer height=”20px”] Rimbaud as “Second Self” [spacer height=”10px”] Rimbaud possessed me completely: what he had seen, albeit in an entirely different place, interfered with what I was seeing, and even went so far as to… Continue reading Review of Paul Stubbs’ A Study on Arthur Rimbaud

[spacer height=”0.1px”]Marcelo Bettoni February 2026 [spacer height=”20px”]   The Return to the Roots: How Free Jazz Liberated the Collective Voice [spacer height=”20px”] To understand Free Jazz in its full dimension, it is essential to unlearn the idea that it emerged as a spontaneous invention out of nothing. In truth, it represented a profound aesthetic and… Continue reading How Free Jazz Liberated the Collective Voice

[spacer height=”0.1px”]Arteidolia January 2026 [spacer height=”20px”] Goodbye World Hello Something Liz Hogg Aagoo Records, 2025 [spacer height=”20px”]   Arteidolia:  In listening to Goodbye World Hello Something, your 2nd solo album, I can hear a unique spark in all your songs.  I checked out the video you did for Irreversible, and the dynamics between the words,… Continue reading Interview w/ Liz Hogg on “Goodbye World Hello Something”

[spacer height=”0.1px”]Arteidolia January 2026 [spacer height=”20px”] Feverdream Poems: Renée K. Nicholson Illustrations: Sally Jane Brown Redhawk Publications, 2026 [spacer height=”20px”]   Arteidolia: Renée, in the author’s afterword in your new collection of poetry, Feverdream you wrote “To say that narrative medicine changed the way I write doesn’t fully encapsulate what its practice has done for… Continue reading “Feverdream” w/ Renée K. Nicholson & Sally Jane Brown

[spacer height=”0.1px”]Pria Louka November 2025 [spacer height=”20px”] [spacer height=”10px”] Phoebe Giannisi’s Homerica Translated from Greek by Brian Sneeden World Poetry Books, 2025 [spacer height=”20px”] Episodic, fragmentary, yet entirely cohesive — steeped in Homeric epic yet rooted in the present — Phoebe Giannisi’s Homerica offers a shattering of canonical epic, symbolically grounded in myth-history yet ultimately… Continue reading Sensuous Silences: On Phoebe Giannisi’s Homerica

[spacer height=”0.1px”]Daniel Barbiero October 2025 [spacer height=”20px”] Prayers With a Side of Cash: Poems While Driving Across America Kathleen Florence Moontide Press, 2025 [spacer height=”20px”] Speaking of Prayers With a Side of Cash, her new collection of poems, Kathleen Florence has said that “old American myths need new voices.” One of the myths revoiced in… Continue reading A Review: Prayers with a Side of Cash/Poems While Driving Across America by Kathleen Florence

[spacer height=”0.1px”]Daniel Barbiero October 2025 [spacer height=”20px”]   Somewhere a Playground Rich Ferguson, Moon Tide Press, 2025 [spacer height=”20px”] In “The Nonnational Boundaries of Surrealism,” André Breton defined “black humour” (humour noir) as the “paradoxical triumph of the pleasure principle over real conditions at the moment when they are considered the most unfavorable.” In its… Continue reading Review: Rich Ferguson’s Somewhere, a Playground

[spacer height=”0.1px”]Marcelo Bettoni October 2025 [spacer height=”30px”] From Gregorian Chant to Free Jazz: A Journey Through the Evolution of Musical Languages [spacer height=”20px”]   The history of Western music is not simply a chronological sequence of styles; it is, above all, a journey through sonic systems that have shaped the way composers and musicians conceive… Continue reading From Gregorian Chant to Free Jazz

[spacer height=”0.1px”]Sally Jane Brown November 2025 [spacer height=”20px”] [spacer height=”20px”] Immersing myself in Sharon Lopez Mooney’s poetry collection, CANTATA for a desert poet, Arteidolia Press, I found myself pondering a timeless adage. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s seminal work, “Wherever You Go, There You Are,” posits that happiness resides within oneself, independent of external circumstances. However, through the… Continue reading Review: CANTATA for a desert poet

Marcelo Bettoni January 2026 [spacer height=”20px”]   Sonny Rollins and the Challenge of Improvisation with Form [spacer height=”20px”] For decades, jazz celebrated fundamental virtues such as swing, melodic invention, and expressive originality. Yet within the realm of improvisation, one crucial aspect often remained in the background: long-range formal awareness. With Sonny Rollins, this issue acquires… Continue reading Sonny Rollins & the Challenge of Improvisation with Form

[spacer height=”0.1px”]Marcelo Bettoni December 2025 [spacer height=”20px”] One of the most significant features of African American culture, consolidated during the 19th century on the slave plantations of the southern United States, is the particular phonetic adaptation of the English language in singing. Expressions such as Heaven → Heb’n or Lord → Lawd are not mere… Continue reading The Musicalization of English: AAVE, Spirituals, and Cultural Resistance

[spacer height=”0.1px”]Marcus David November 2025 [spacer height=”40px”] Georgia Waehler, Nathan Darrow, photo by Russ Rowland [spacer height=”40px”] By first impression Ali Keller’s (UN)CONDITIONAL appears to be a play in which two couples becoming sexually involved with each other, at least that was impression I had. However, the play takes a far more disturbing path. Director Ivey… Continue reading Review: (UN)CONDITIONAL

[spacer height=”0.1px”]Daniel Barbiero December 2025 [spacer height=”20px”] Endurable Infinity by Tony Kitt University of Pittsburgh Press [spacer height=”20px”] The central tenet of Surrealist and Surrealist-inspired writing is that language reveals through imagery that catalyzes thought. Such imagery, as first defined by poet Pierre Reverdy and then taken up by Surrealism’s chief theorist André Breton, would… Continue reading Tony Kitt’s Endurable Infinity

Marcelo Bettoni November 2025 [spacer height=”20px”] The history of the violin in African American hands is a journey spanning centuries of struggle, resistance, and creativity. From its earliest presence on Southern plantations in the United States to its influence on modern jazz, the violin has played a central role in shaping African American musical identity. Though… Continue reading The African American Violin: A Symbol of Resistance and Adaptation

[spacer height=”0.1px”]Marcus David November 2025 [spacer height=”40px”] [spacer height=”40px”] La Mama once again brings us challenging and timely theater with the searing and provocative world premiere of And Then We Were No More, a new play by Tim Blake Nelson and directed by Mark Wing-Davey that will leave you wondering where the heck are we headed as… Continue reading Review: And Then We Were No More

[spacer height=”0.1px”]Marcelo Bettoni December 2025 [spacer height=”20px”] John Corbett and Free Improvisation: A Practice of Expanded Listening [spacer height=”20px”] When I began delving into John Corbett’s thinking, I discovered something that transformed my way of understanding free improvisation: it’s not about mastering a language, but about learning to be present in sound. Corbett understands free… Continue reading John Corbett and Free Improvisation

[spacer height=”0.1px”]Marcus David October 2025 [spacer height=”40px”] [spacer height=”40px”] We are in the height of this year’s spooky season and for those of us that revel in the macabre 59E59 Theaters is offering up something that will truly make your blood curdle with DREADFUL EPISODES a wonderful theatrical collage inspired by the illustrations of Edward… Continue reading Review: Dreadful Episodes

[spacer height=”0.1px”]Marcus David November 2025 [spacer height=”40px”] [spacer height=”40px”]   When it comes to beauty the idea of forced conformity is as old as time and Tamar Rogoff’s Drop Dead…Gorgeous takes on this notion with a dazzling and poignant tale of beauty standards run amok. La Mama once again makes a strong social statement with this… Continue reading Review: Drop Dead…Gorgeous 

[spacer height=”0.1px”] Colette Copeland September 2025 [spacer height=”40px”] [spacer height=”20px”] Resist, Re-live and Proceed: A Conversation with Erica Felicella [spacer height=”20px”] Colette Copeland: Historically, your work hasn’t been overtly political, but I believe performance art is inherently political. Since its emergence in the U.S. during the late 1960s and early ’70s, performance art has served… Continue reading Erica Felicella

[spacer height=”0.1px”]Marcelo Bettoni September 2025 [spacer height=”30px”] [spacer height=”20px”]   Schoenberg, Sandole, and Coltrane: An Invisible Thread Between Musical Modernity and Giant Steps [spacer height=”20px”] The musical history of the twentieth century is marked by a continuous rupture with inherited forms and the emergence of new systems of sound organization. In this context, the often… Continue reading Schoenberg, Sandole, and Coltrane

[spacer height=”0.1px”]ArteidoliaSeptember 2025 [spacer height=”20px”] [spacer height=”20px”] You’ve titled your upcoming poetry chapbook, BOY APPARITION, a travelogue of atemporal genders. Very intriguing. Could you expand on this further? This collection is all about the liminality of being a transmasculine butch—how one can be emphatically not a woman but still have no interest in passing as… Continue reading mk zariel on “BOY APPARITION”

[spacer height=”0.1px”]Arielle Burgdorf August 2025 [spacer height=”20px”] [spacer height=”20px”] trying to sneak one form into another An Interview with traducciones trepidantes [spacer height=”20px”] In the pages of a zine, visual artist and educator Luisa Martínez translates “traducciones trepidantes” as: trembling translations. More commonly in Spanish, trepidante means breakneck, thrilling, fast-paced. But trembling is a good… Continue reading traducciones trepidantes

[spacer height=”0.1px”]Marcelo BettoniAugust 2025 [spacer height=”20px”]   Algorithmic Canon and Performative Agency in Natural Machines by Dan Tepfer: A Reading of “All The Things You Are / Canon at the Octave” [spacer height=”20px”] This essay examines the first episode of the Natural Machines series by pianist and astrophysicist Dan Tepfer, in which the jazz standard… Continue reading Performative Agency in Natural Machines

[spacer height=”0.1px”]Daniel Barbiero July 2025 [spacer height=”20px”] [spacer height=”10px”] Escritoire Sheila E. Murphy Lavender Ink Press, 2025 [spacer height=”20px”] In Escritoire, Sheila E. Murphy’s new collection of poems, language is given the room to reconstruct the world on its own terms, even if that world is first met through close observation and poignant recollection. Eventually,… Continue reading Sheila Murphy’s “Escritoire”

[spacer height=”0.1px”]Marcelo Bettoni July 2025   [spacer height=”20px”] The Jazz Paradox in the Digital Age: Between Immediacy and Authentic Expression [spacer height=”10px”] In today’s world, where social media dominates how we consume content, many musicians face a dilemma: how can one develop an authentic voice when digital formats demand immediacy and technical display? The tendency… Continue reading The Jazz Paradox in the Digital Age

July 2025 [spacer height=”30px”] Hong Kong performance of Frequency in Motion, 2024 [spacer height=”30px”] Filmmaker and sound artist Chris H. Lynn is based in the Washington, DC area. His digital images and Super 8 films explore the subtle rhythms of movement, light, and sound in urban and rural landscapes that vary from the Eastern shores… Continue reading Frequency in Motion

[spacer height=”0.1px”] Mark Schmidt June 2025    Jennifer Nelson On the Way to the Paintings of Forest Robberies Fence Books, 2025 [spacer height=”20px”] The gap between visual art and literature is either illusory or fictional, depending on which side your allegiance lies. Jennifer Nelson’s On the Way to the Paintings of Forest Robberies (2025) is… Continue reading On the Way to the Paintings of Forest Robberies