Shelley Duvall for the New York Times, April 2024

“It is, often enough, only by seeing in a poem the choice that was not made that we understand the choice that has been made. The ‘erasures’ that lie under the printed line are often deducible from previous poems or later ones, or from a parent poem in the tradition, or from the formula of common speech that is being avoided.”

— Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats

this is still the realest gay yearning hes ever expressed

please don't touch me, 2021 by Luka Khabelashvili

poem by mosab abu toha pasted to ironwoodfarmny’s truck traveling from Ghent, NY

says a lot. says a lot

Ugh, was having a great time mocking my recently imprisoned rival when I noticed the camera positioning makes it so that I appear behind the bars, thus framing me as trapped in a metaphorical prison of the narrative, now my whole day is ruined. Fuck.

Hajime Sorayama (1989)

Yosuke Ohnishi, jca annual 4 (1982)

2004

Corn in all its colors!

Palestinian artist Mohammad Rakouie created his first works while held captive at Askalan prison in the 1980s, using crayons and pillowcases.

necklace by sah oved, c. 1950 in twentieth-century jewelry - barbara cartlidge (1985)

Carl Strathmann - Maria (ca. 1890s)

Andrei Andrejew, set design drawing for Crime and Punishment (Raskolnikow) 1923

Robert Herlth and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Faust 1926

Set drawing for ”Das Kabinett des Dr Caligari” 1920

Hermann Warm, Robert Wiene’s “Das Kabinett des Dr Caligari” 1919

Jane Forth by Jack Mitchell 1971

"First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and interrogated, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.

And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific reverse shock: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers around the racks invent, refine, discuss." -Aimé Césaire