Pride

We are celebrating Pride with a selection of features from our archive, free and open to all to read for the coming weeks.

Jericho Brown's poem "The Old Testament," from a portfolio of New American Poets in APS No. 11, which we reread while listening to an interview with him at New Letters: "When I read Emily Dickinson, and I feel all of the feelings that I feel reading Emily Dickinson, I also know that she didn't expect me, as a reader—she didn't expect anybody as a reader, let alone me. And yet she gets to be a part of my community, and I get to be a part of hers. I think that's something supernatural."

"The Mausoleum of Lovers," the journals of the French writer and photographer Hervé Guibert, who died of AIDS in 1991, at the age of thirty-six. Nathanaël wrote about translating these journals, a selection of which appeared in APS No. 17, for PEN: "If translation is a form of desire intercut with grief and with grievance, then this text, Le mausolée des amants, makes every essential demand upon me; the sensual exigencies, and cruel untempered forms of address in this epistolary work—foremost an open letter addressed to Guibert’s lover, T....—mark the rest of us as gilt intruders upon the romance, reinforcing a de facto relationship of exiguity to language, to textual indecency."

Alex Dimitrov's poem "Perfect Day" from APS No. 25: "The title is Lou Reed's and 'Perfect Day' is my favorite song of his. Once I listened to it for an entire day on repeat with a friend."

Maureen N. McLane's poem "Haunt," (APS No. 9), of which our poetry editor Brett Fletcher Lauer says: "Like all good hauntings—the poem includes our own anxieties, and 'memories singing and shifting' for the dead."

Garth Greenwell's story "Mentor" (APS No. 22), which "shares the world of What Belongs to You, covering things that I want to explore that for whatever reason didn’t fit into the container of the novel. There’s so much from my experience in Bulgaria that I feel I’m still processing."

And Luc Sante's translation of a poem written by a teenage Arthur Rimbaud (APS No. 6); along with Adrienne Rich's poem "Tracings," (APS No. 16) written the year before her death at eighty-two: "Imagine a mind overhearing language / split open, uncodified as / yet or never."

Please read, and amplify, these pieces.