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“Deep alongsideness”: translating the city in parentheses, quotation, and book objects

A review of Claudina Domingo’s ‘Transit’ translated by Ryan Greene (Eulalia Books, 2024)

Cover of Claudina Domingo’s ‘Transit’ translated by Ryan Greene

Claudina Domingo began the poems in Transit by walking 24 routes through Mexico City and registering the accretions of those experiences. First published by the Mexico City-based editorial Tierra Adentro in 2011, Ryan Greene's 2024 translation with Eulalia Books puts the book in conversation with poetic texts in English interested in spatial practices in the situationist lineage. Domingo’s routes chart, as Greene describes, “a path past ‘half-chewed’ churches, through churning markets, and under rain-drenched awnings” as the poems trace onto the page an accumulated streetscape of Mexico City’s pasts and presents.

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October 10, 2024

Pace and place: disability politics at desert speeds

An interview with Naomi Ortiz

A white Mestiza woman stands in the desert wearing a purple top and blue bandana — Naomi Ortiz

From belly button to umbilical cord to roots, Naomi Ortiz traces the relationships between body and place in her work. In the opening of Sustaining Spirit, Ortiz asks: “¿y donde esta tu ombligo? Where are you centered or rooted?

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April 30, 2020

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Vancouver to New York City

Catching up with Kevin Davies

Kevin Davies

Scott Inniss

As a low-level worker (“copy chief”) in a boutique marketing firm, I of course came across this abbreviation a lot on the documents I inspected. “For position only” seemed appropriate for what I saw as the haphazard, seemingly random work I managed to eke out from 2007 to 2013.

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July 1, 2025

Language-Noise Festival 1982

New York Public Theater

Language/Noise Festival, at New York Public Theater
January 11, 1982

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July 1, 2025

Two of a kind (PennSound Rewind #2)

A lesson in grieving and acceptance from Allen and Louis Ginsberg

PennSound Rewind

An old man and his hippie son, both poets. — Louis and Allen Ginsberg in Miami, 1969

Two decades after memorializing his mother Naomi in “Kaddish,” we find Ginsberg working in a very different mode as he actively documents the death of his father Louis in one, or eventually, two poems with the same name. The first “Don’t Grow Old,” written around the time of Louis’ death, appeared in the collection Mind Breaths in 1978; the latter can be found in 1982’s Plutonian Ode. However the two works were envisioned by Ginsberg as one complete poem, as evidenced by a number of recordings made by Robert Creeley at the time of the second poem’s composition and the broader recorded history contained on Ginsberg’s PennSound author page. As we explore “Don’t Grow Old” (and “‘Don’t Grow Old’”), we’ll witness Ginsberg come to terms with his father through his decline, then see how latter poem reframes that experience through Louis’ reciprocal acceptance of his son’s queer identity, offering up potent lessons in mourning, as well as an important statement regarding homodomesticity and intergenerational reconciliation.

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June 30, 2025