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  • Poetry
    Remembering Carla Macoggi: Excerpts from “Kkeywa- Storia di una bambina meticcia” and “Nemesi della rossa”

    The delicate hour of the birds among the branches – Poems by Melih Cevdet Anday (trans. Neil P. Doherty)

    Afro Women Poetry- SUDAN: Reem Yasir, Rajaa Bushara, Fatma Latif

    Afro Women Poetry- SUDAN: Reem Yasir, Rajaa Bushara, Fatma Latif

    Overturning planes in the labyrinth – Four poems by Rita Degli Esposti

    A flock of cardinals melted in the scarlet sky: Poems by Daryna Gladun

    Overturning planes in the labyrinth – Four poems by Rita Degli Esposti

    The wolf hour and other poems by Ella Yevtushenko

    Overturning planes in the labyrinth – Four poems by Rita Degli Esposti

    Testing the worth of poetic bombshells – Four poems by Abdul Karim Al-Ahmad

    Overturning planes in the labyrinth – Four poems by Rita Degli Esposti

    Overturning planes in the labyrinth – Four poems by Rita Degli Esposti

  • Fiction
    Chapter ten, from”Come What May” by Ahmed Masoud

    Chapter ten, from”Come What May” by Ahmed Masoud

    Remembering Carla Macoggi: Excerpts from “Kkeywa- Storia di una bambina meticcia” and “Nemesi della rossa”

    Remembering Carla Macoggi: Excerpts from “Kkeywa- Storia di una bambina meticcia” and “Nemesi della rossa”

    In memoriam – Swimming in the Tigris, Greenford: The Poetical Journey of Fawzi Karim, by Marius Kociejowski

    The Naked Shell of Aloneness – Kazi Rafi

    Pioneer’s Portrait: How Voltaire Contributed to Comparative Literature, by Razu Alauddin    

    The Shadow of a Shadow – Nandini Sahu

    Overturning planes in the labyrinth – Four poems by Rita Degli Esposti

    Football is Life – Mojaffor Hossein

    Datura – Paulami Sengupta

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    Overturning planes in the labyrinth – Four poems by Rita Degli Esposti

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    BOW / BHUK – Parimal Bhattacharya

  • Non Fiction
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    Pioneer’s Portrait: How Voltaire Contributed to Comparative Literature, by Razu Alauddin    

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    A tribute to Carla Macoggi – An invitation to reading her novels, by Jessy Simonini

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    In memoriam – Swimming in the Tigris, Greenford: The Poetical Journey of Fawzi Karim, by Marius Kociejowski

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    Overturning planes in the labyrinth – Four poems by Rita Degli Esposti

    Of romantic love and its perils: The lyrics of the enigmatic Barbara Strozzi – Luciana Messina

  • Interviews & reviews
    Pioneer’s Portrait: How Voltaire Contributed to Comparative Literature, by Razu Alauddin    

    Paradoxes of misfits and wanderers: Modhura Bandyopadhyay reviews Stalks of Lotus

    Beauty and Defiance: Ukrainian contemporary paintings in Padua- Show organizer Liudmila Vladova Olenovych in conversation with Camilla Boemio

    Beauty and Defiance: Ukrainian contemporary paintings in Padua- Show organizer Liudmila Vladova Olenovych in conversation with Camilla Boemio

    Remembering Carla Macoggi: Excerpts from “Kkeywa- Storia di una bambina meticcia” and “Nemesi della rossa”

    A preview of Greek poet Tsabika Hatzinikola’s second collection “Without Presence, Dreams Do Not Emerge”, by Georg Schaaf

    Ascension: A conversation with Matthew Smith

    Ascension: A conversation with Matthew Smith

    Overturning planes in the labyrinth – Four poems by Rita Degli Esposti

    Of Concentric Storytelling, Footballs and the Shifting World

    Lexically Sugared Circuits of R/elation: A Conversation with Adeena Karasick

    Lexically Sugared Circuits of R/elation: A Conversation with Adeena Karasick

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    Camilla Boemio interviews Malaysian artist Kim Ng

    Poetic bridges and conversations: Icelandic, Kiswahili and English through three poems by Hlín Leifsdóttir

    Overturning planes in the labyrinth – Four poems by Rita Degli Esposti

    Human Bestiary Series – Five Poems by Pina Piccolo

    Bear encounters in Italy:  Jj4, anthropomorphized nature and the dialectics of generations – Post by Maurizio Vitale (a.k.a. Jack Daniel)

    Bear encounters in Italy: Jj4, anthropomorphized nature and the dialectics of generations – Post by Maurizio Vitale (a.k.a. Jack Daniel)

    Chapter four from “La cena- Avanzi dell’ex Jugoslavia”, by Božidar Stanišić

    Chapter four from “La cena- Avanzi dell’ex Jugoslavia”, by Božidar Stanišić

    Overturning planes in the labyrinth – Four poems by Rita Degli Esposti

    A song of peace and other poems by Julio Monteiro Martins

    Overturning planes in the labyrinth – Four poems by Rita Degli Esposti

    I am the storm rattling iron door handles (Part I)- Poems by Michael D. Amitin

    Datura – Paulami Sengupta

    Datura – Paulami Sengupta

    Overturning planes in the labyrinth – Four poems by Rita Degli Esposti

    Spirited away by the northern winds (Part I) – Poems by Marcello Tagliente

    Pioneer’s Portrait: How Voltaire Contributed to Comparative Literature, by Razu Alauddin    

    Like a geological specimen in a darkened room: Two poems by Neil Davidson

  • News
    HAIR IN THE WIND – Calling on poets to join international project in solidarity with the women of Iran

    HAIR IN THE WIND – Calling on poets to join international project in solidarity with the women of Iran

    THE DREAMING MACHINE ISSUE N. 11 WILL BE OUT ON DEC. 10

    THE DREAMING MACHINE ISSUE N. 11 WILL BE OUT ON DEC. 10

    RUCKSACK – GLOBAL POETRY PATCHWORK PROJECT

    RUCKSACK – GLOBAL POETRY PATCHWORK PROJECT

    REFUGEE TALES July 3-5:  Register for a Walk In Solidarity with Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Detainees

    REFUGEE TALES July 3-5: Register for a Walk In Solidarity with Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Detainees

    IL BIANCO E IL NERO – LE PAROLE PER DIRLO, Conference Milan Sept. 7

    IL BIANCO E IL NERO – LE PAROLE PER DIRLO, Conference Milan Sept. 7

    OPEN POEM TO THE CURATORS OF THE 58th VENICE BIENNALE  FROM THE GHOSTS OF THAT RELIC YOU SHOULD NOT DARE CALL “OUR BOAT” (Pina Piccolo)

    OPEN POEM TO THE CURATORS OF THE 58th VENICE BIENNALE FROM THE GHOSTS OF THAT RELIC YOU SHOULD NOT DARE CALL “OUR BOAT” (Pina Piccolo)

  • Home
  • Poetry
    Remembering Carla Macoggi: Excerpts from “Kkeywa- Storia di una bambina meticcia” and “Nemesi della rossa”

    The delicate hour of the birds among the branches – Poems by Melih Cevdet Anday (trans. Neil P. Doherty)

    Afro Women Poetry- SUDAN: Reem Yasir, Rajaa Bushara, Fatma Latif

    Afro Women Poetry- SUDAN: Reem Yasir, Rajaa Bushara, Fatma Latif

    Overturning planes in the labyrinth – Four poems by Rita Degli Esposti

    A flock of cardinals melted in the scarlet sky: Poems by Daryna Gladun

    Overturning planes in the labyrinth – Four poems by Rita Degli Esposti

    The wolf hour and other poems by Ella Yevtushenko

    Overturning planes in the labyrinth – Four poems by Rita Degli Esposti

    Testing the worth of poetic bombshells – Four poems by Abdul Karim Al-Ahmad

    Overturning planes in the labyrinth – Four poems by Rita Degli Esposti

    Overturning planes in the labyrinth – Four poems by Rita Degli Esposti

  • Fiction
    Chapter ten, from”Come What May” by Ahmed Masoud

    Chapter ten, from”Come What May” by Ahmed Masoud

    Remembering Carla Macoggi: Excerpts from “Kkeywa- Storia di una bambina meticcia” and “Nemesi della rossa”

    Remembering Carla Macoggi: Excerpts from “Kkeywa- Storia di una bambina meticcia” and “Nemesi della rossa”

    In memoriam – Swimming in the Tigris, Greenford: The Poetical Journey of Fawzi Karim, by Marius Kociejowski

    The Naked Shell of Aloneness – Kazi Rafi

    Pioneer’s Portrait: How Voltaire Contributed to Comparative Literature, by Razu Alauddin    

    The Shadow of a Shadow – Nandini Sahu

    Overturning planes in the labyrinth – Four poems by Rita Degli Esposti

    Football is Life – Mojaffor Hossein

    Datura – Paulami Sengupta

    Datura – Paulami Sengupta

    Overturning planes in the labyrinth – Four poems by Rita Degli Esposti

    Origin – 1. The House, at night, by Predrag Finci

    HOT MANGO CHUTNEY SAUCE – Farah Ahamed (from Period Matters)

    HOT MANGO CHUTNEY SAUCE – Farah Ahamed (from Period Matters)

    Take Note of the Sun Shining Within Twilight – Four Poems by Natalia Beltchenko

    BOW / BHUK – Parimal Bhattacharya

  • Non Fiction
    My Lover, My Body – Gonca Özmen, trans. by Neil P. Doherty

    My Lover, My Body – Gonca Özmen, trans. by Neil P. Doherty

    Pioneer’s Portrait: How Voltaire Contributed to Comparative Literature, by Razu Alauddin    

    Pioneer’s Portrait: How Voltaire Contributed to Comparative Literature, by Razu Alauddin    

    A tribute to Carla Macoggi – An invitation to reading her novels, by Jessy Simonini

    A tribute to Carla Macoggi – An invitation to reading her novels, by Jessy Simonini

    In memoriam – Swimming in the Tigris, Greenford: The Poetical Journey of Fawzi Karim, by Marius Kociejowski

    In memoriam – Swimming in the Tigris, Greenford: The Poetical Journey of Fawzi Karim, by Marius Kociejowski

    What Gets Read: How the Beats Caught on in Italy – Clark Bouwman

    What Gets Read: How the Beats Caught on in Italy – Clark Bouwman

    Overturning planes in the labyrinth – Four poems by Rita Degli Esposti

    Of romantic love and its perils: The lyrics of the enigmatic Barbara Strozzi – Luciana Messina

  • Interviews & reviews
    Pioneer’s Portrait: How Voltaire Contributed to Comparative Literature, by Razu Alauddin    

    Paradoxes of misfits and wanderers: Modhura Bandyopadhyay reviews Stalks of Lotus

    Beauty and Defiance: Ukrainian contemporary paintings in Padua- Show organizer Liudmila Vladova Olenovych in conversation with Camilla Boemio

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    Remembering Carla Macoggi: Excerpts from “Kkeywa- Storia di una bambina meticcia” and “Nemesi della rossa”

    A preview of Greek poet Tsabika Hatzinikola’s second collection “Without Presence, Dreams Do Not Emerge”, by Georg Schaaf

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    Overturning planes in the labyrinth – Four poems by Rita Degli Esposti

    Of Concentric Storytelling, Footballs and the Shifting World

    Lexically Sugared Circuits of R/elation: A Conversation with Adeena Karasick

    Lexically Sugared Circuits of R/elation: A Conversation with Adeena Karasick

  • Out of bounds
    • All
    • Fiction
    • Intersections
    • Interviews and reviews
    • Non fiction
    • Poetry
    Camilla Boemio interviews Malaysian artist Kim Ng

    Poetic bridges and conversations: Icelandic, Kiswahili and English through three poems by Hlín Leifsdóttir

    Overturning planes in the labyrinth – Four poems by Rita Degli Esposti

    Human Bestiary Series – Five Poems by Pina Piccolo

    Bear encounters in Italy:  Jj4, anthropomorphized nature and the dialectics of generations – Post by Maurizio Vitale (a.k.a. Jack Daniel)

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    Chapter four from “La cena- Avanzi dell’ex Jugoslavia”, by Božidar Stanišić

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    Overturning planes in the labyrinth – Four poems by Rita Degli Esposti

    A song of peace and other poems by Julio Monteiro Martins

    Overturning planes in the labyrinth – Four poems by Rita Degli Esposti

    I am the storm rattling iron door handles (Part I)- Poems by Michael D. Amitin

    Datura – Paulami Sengupta

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    Overturning planes in the labyrinth – Four poems by Rita Degli Esposti

    Spirited away by the northern winds (Part I) – Poems by Marcello Tagliente

    Pioneer’s Portrait: How Voltaire Contributed to Comparative Literature, by Razu Alauddin    

    Like a geological specimen in a darkened room: Two poems by Neil Davidson

  • News
    HAIR IN THE WIND – Calling on poets to join international project in solidarity with the women of Iran

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Home Out of bounds Interviews and reviews

Dispatches from the Rio Grande Valley – Tongo Eisen-Martin

Courtesy of El Tecolote, published on July 13, 2018. The following is a first person account by San Francisco revolutionary and poet, Tongo Eisen-Martin, who spent three days at the U.S.-Mexico border in late June, showing solidarity with the incarcerated Central American children who have been separated from their families by the Trump Administration.

December 2, 2018
in Interviews and reviews, Out of bounds, The dreaming machine n 3
Photogallery of Hassan Vahedi’s Paintings; Introduction to “Eclairements (Luminanze)” Catalog – Claudio Strinati
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Sean Tanner poses for a photo with a cat who actually got arrested for trying to force his way into one of the detention centers. Courtesy: Tongo Eisen-MartinSean Tanner poses for a photo with a cat who actually got arrested for trying to force his way into one of the detention centers. Courtesy: Tongo Eisen-Martin
People, who spoke in front of Ursula, pose for a photo during a demonstration in Brownsville. Courtesy: Tongo Eisen-MartinPeople, who spoke in front of Ursula, pose for a photo during a demonstration in Brownsville. Courtesy: Tongo Eisen-Martin
Workers at the activist organization LUPE, founded by Cesar Chavez, participate in a hunger strike ceremony. Courtesy: Tongo Eisen-MartinWorkers at the activist organization LUPE, founded by Cesar Chavez, participate in a hunger strike ceremony. Courtesy: Tongo Eisen-Martin
Workers at the activist organization LUPE, founded by Cesar Chavez, participate in a hunger strike ceremony. Courtesy: Tongo Eisen-MartinWorkers at the activist organization LUPE, founded by Cesar Chavez, participate in a hunger strike ceremony. Courtesy: Tongo Eisen-Martin
Sean Tanner poses for a photo with a cat who actually got arrested for trying to force his way into one of the detention centers. Courtesy: Tongo Eisen-MartinSean Tanner poses for a photo with a cat who actually got arrested for trying to force his way into one of the detention centers. Courtesy: Tongo Eisen-Martin
People, who spoke in front of Ursula, pose for a photo during a demonstration in Brownsville. Courtesy: Tongo Eisen-MartinPeople, who spoke in front of Ursula, pose for a photo during a demonstration in Brownsville. Courtesy: Tongo Eisen-Martin

My first day in McAllen, Texas, I stand in front of the Ursula Detention Center, nicknamed, “El Refrigerador” by those who had been incarcerated there. I am participating in a demonstration in front of the detention center which blends into a strip of industrial corporate park buildings; neighbored directly to its left by “DanHil Containers: Manufacturers of Corrugated Boxes.” I watch a bus full of kids pull out of the detention center alongside protestors who have heart, but no superpowers.

I am traveling with Sean Tanner, an organizer from San Francisco. After a couple of weeks of watching terrified toddlers taken from their heartbroken mothers and reading about 1,500 children lost by the system, we are here to lend a hand to any organizing efforts and to report back what we see.  Sean dives right into the protest effort trying to augment the ever-waning energy of protestors whose various signs and petitions at times existed in contradiction with each other. Degrees of demands ranging from radical to apple-pie reform. Another van with tiny heads in the windows follows the first bus out. I’m not sure whether strategically or poetically, but the van pulls out right as our cage walk of a march swings away from the gate. Some jog for a couple of steps or powerwalk a little toward the kids with a palpable despair, but it is too late.

One-sided war stories abound in the demonstration; the system standing in complete supremacy and absolute power over the people. For every one congress person who has gotten inside the detention center, thousands have been denied. The most we can do is provide services to any refugees released from detention or engage in symbolic intervention of military industrial business as usual.

People make speeches on a bullhorn. A heroic young woman fearlessly takes the bullhorn and declares that she is undocumented but will not be silent. She demands the release of all people (child or otherwise) and the abolition of ICE.

Some type of government agent stands outside the detention center with a camera that has what looks like a one-foot lens photographing protestors. One foot of lens to zoom in on sixty feet of activity. “Whoever wasn’t on the list before, is on the list now,” is the effect he is looking for, I suppose. Standing around next to the government agent are border patrol officers who are so comfortable in their operation that they are relatively benign to protestors. One soldier even tells us to not hesitate to ask them for help if a bad storm comes down. I think of an excerpt from a James Baldwin essay titled Fifth Avenue, Uptown:

Their [police officers’] very presence is an insult, and it would be, even if they spent their entire day feeding gumdrops to children. They represent the force of the white world, and that world’s real intentions are, simply, for that world’s criminal profit and ease, to keep the black man corralled up here, in his place.

Sean makes the news. And a protestor who wanted to sing the United States national anthem to the flag (or to the barbed wire blocking it?) makes the front page of a newspaper.

Militarized RGV

“This is homeboy who cooked for the refugees everyday.” —Courtesy: Tongo Eisen-Martin

 

 

 

In the Rio Grande Valley, the military industrial complex is comfortable. South Texas is a softcore albeit less ceremonial and one-sided Korean DMZ. Even two or three hundred miles north of the border is a checkpoint where well-armed soldiers question our citizenship. Everywhere seems to be absolute open season on Latinx people. The border (military reality) sets the cultural tone, where other aspects of life seem like an afterthought. In Brownsville, Texas, home of the Walmart detention center for children there is also a community college using an old rundown mall for a campus. And while in fairness, UT Brownsville, fairly close to the border, was impressively-manicured, it does not put a dent in the militarized landscape.

The “international” bridge in Brownsville is rather unremarkable. You can take some pictures of random overpasses on rainy days throughout the United States, put them in a pile with the bridge at Brownsville and play a tough game of “which one is the border”. All that to say, they can make a border of anything. Just add some barbed wire, some soldiers, and a permanent enemy of color. The military edifices of the border (and the thousands of people they employ) look impervious to ballots. I wanted to run back and tell what I saw to the white activist in McAllen who (along with activated others) believed that Texas is actually a blue state waiting to happen if we could mount a zealous electoral ground game.

Feeding the shackled

There is a zealous ground game in South Texas. Built around services for brutalized people. Catholic Charities provide food, supplies, and respite to hundreds of ankle-monitor shackled mothers released from detention. Volunteers work tirelessly. A young man who daily makes food for the refugees gets choked up and unable to relate his own story of crossing the so-called border as a child. The community college professor who put Sean and myself onto the Catholic Charities at the Ursula demonstration appears now with his volunteer shirt on. He has been at it all day since the morning demonstration and will stop in the evening only to teach his college course.

Kidnapped asylum seekers looked exhausted and shell-shocked.

I did not have a translator and speak next-to-useless Spanish. In attempts at conversations with people I get fragments of image and sound effect. Children crying all night. Making two-month treks to get to border patrol abuse. People not being allowed to legally seek asylum and being forced off of bridges into the hands of soldiers calling them illegals.

RGV: Ideal locale for concentration camps

The next storm didn’t come, but the Rio Grande Valley was still recovering from a flood. Workers at the activist organization LUPE, founded by Cesar Chavez, told us it was hard to organize people when even the organizers couldn’t maintain stable housing. The RGV is the home of beautiful, perpetually destabilized people. A perfect place to erect and maintain concentration camps. The LUPE office is full of people looking for services, looking for survival. Even the most non-reformist, theory-directed revolutionary has to admit that people do immediately need a change of clothes, lawyers need translators, and people need to find and pull their families out of the jaws of the military industrial complex. A military industrial complex so fused with the prison industrial complex in this crime against humanity that maybe they were never not the same thing in the first place.

We stopped back through McAllen to chat with a woman I befriended working in a gas station. She had become a second home base for us. Sean and I stopped in the gas station during the Ursula demonstration to buy water for everyone and for some cosmic reason, at the counter, are small talk was big enough to discover that her son is getting a PhD in Literature, was a huge fan of the beat poets and by extension City Lights, and by extension knew and dug my work. In her opinion, the kidnapping of children, was not an escalation (of what has been going on in the RGV for decades) big enough to call this situation “anything new.” We wheeled back around to Ursula to see if the pediatrician, who had been camping out in front demanding to examine the children, was still there. Besides a couple of people with video cameras, the street was empty. Empty aside from the McAllen city employees who were painting all of the curbs yellow to make sure future protestors would have to walk from a lot farther to demonstrate in front of the detention center again.

The Struggle Continues

But an escalation of resistance may be coming. Some activists at LUPE, including the director, are ready for more direct intervention. Various people in various organizations related that it is the international bridges where effective stands can be made. But this will take more people. A lot more people than the RGV has mobilized now, especially given that the people mobilized now are incredibly stretched by all of the struggle they are currently trying to hold down.

We daily checked in with or were checked on by the folks who graciously put us up in the RGV. A friend of mine’s parents who made sure we wanted for nothing. They fed our confidence in the people and a liberation we must continue struggling for.

In south Texas, all I mostly saw was pain and the normalization of state violence.

The United States is at war with the people of the Global South. A war without terms. Neoliberal policies, global warming results, and direct political and military annihilation of political forces for the people and resistance to capitalism have produced a social environment so deadly that people would rather deal with abuses in the north than survive their repressed and exploited homelands. I don’t think anyone believes in American milk and honey anymore (if they ever did). People just don’t want to be shot. Imperialist violence is borderless. Our resistance must be the same. It must be international and politically clear on the entirety of the contradiction between the global oppressors and the global oppressed.

Link to original article in El Tecolote.

 

Tongo Eisen-Martin was born in San Francisco and earned his MA at Columbia University. He is the author of someone’s dead already (Bootstrap Press, 2015), nominated for a California Book Award; and Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights, 2017), which received a 2018 American Book Award, a 2018 California Book Award, was named a 2018 National California Booksellers Association Poetry Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the 2018 Griffin International Poetry Prize. In their citation, the judges for the Griffin Prize wrote that Eisen-Martin’s work “moves between trenchant political critique and dreamlike association, demonstrating how, in the right hands, one mode might energize the other—keeping alternative orders of meaning alive in the face of radical injustice … His poems are places where discourses and vernaculars collide and recombine into new configurations capable of expressing outrage and sorrow and love.”

Eisen-Martin is also an educator and organizer whose work centers on issues of mass incarceration, extrajudicial killings of Black people, and human rights. He has taught at detention centers around the country and at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. He lives in San Francisco.

 

Cover image: painting by Hassan Vahedi.

Tags: Children separated from parentsDispatchesEl TecoloteMc AllenmigrationMission District-San FranciscopoetRio Grande ValleysolidarityTexasTongo Eisen-MartinUrsula Detention CenterUS-Mexico Bordervolunteers
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Bear encounters in Italy:  Jj4, anthropomorphized nature and the dialectics of generations – Post by Maurizio Vitale (a.k.a. Jack Daniel)

Bear encounters in Italy: Jj4, anthropomorphized nature and the dialectics of generations – Post by Maurizio Vitale (a.k.a. Jack Daniel)

May 2, 2023

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HAIR IN THE WIND – Calling on poets to join international project in solidarity with the women of Iran
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HAIR IN THE WIND – Calling on poets to join international project in solidarity with the women of Iran

by Dreaming Machine
12 months ago
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HAIR IN THE WIND we  invite all poets from all countries to be part of the artistic-poetic performance HAIR IN...

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