Apparently contemporary fiction is suffering from an infusion of effeminate, lazy, timid and predictable male writers. Or at least that’s the impression I get from the Canadian-based publisher Raincoast and the sprinkling of various reviewers who are championing former Nassau Weekly editor Nathan Sellyn ’04’s literary debut Indigenous Beasts as a “daring collection of fiction” from “a bold, young writer whose work is masculine, energetic, and shocking.” For the record, I have no idea what a “masculine” piece of fiction could be, beyond containing a bunch of tough-guy male characters (but, then again, so does a lot of gay erotica).

Bill O’Reilly is obsessed with how long it takes a murder victim to die. In his novel – that’s right, his novel – we find out, for example, that “the soft tissue gave way quickly and the steel penetrated the correspondent’s brain stem. Ron Costello was clinically dead in four seconds.” Or, “Lance Worthington couldn’t feel the razor-sharp box-cutter blade slice through his throat…. it was exactly two seconds before he lost consciousness.” Some deaths come even quicker: “A slab of sizzling white hot metal fell directly on his head. Death for Shannon Michaels came one second later.”

Deion Sanders is flying into town this weekend to see BodyHype’s spring show, so I really can’t see why you wouldn’t just make the ten minute trek over to Theater Intime.
No really. Neon Deion has been text messaging BodyHype president Natasha Kalimada ’07, whom he met ...

One of my primary introductions to the Arts, and more specifically the Performing Arts, was through the little-known genre of Modern Dance called “Site-Specific Dance-Poetry Fusion.” I have been taken with this unique blend of spoken and written words and dance since I was a child, and have done much reading about it, including the seminal works Poetry, and also Dance by Klaus Fuchten and Movement through Word in a Particular Place by the legendary Mary Timrock. Oh god, I’m lying!

The show goes up in the Armory. The stage area – a high-ceilinged opening, difficult to describe and even more difficult to see in the dim blue light – surrounds two rows of mismatched chairs. The audience sits in the center of the space, dressed in their Houseparties formalwear. There are sculptures ...

I loathe romance. I was the girl who laughed hysterically at the many public declarations of love made in Love, Actually and the tender resolution to any and all Meg Ryan movies; flowers, candlelight dinners and heart-shaped boxes of chocolate should be kept away from me lest I lose all ...

A couple Fridays ago, joined by the presidents of Kappa and Pi Phi, I spoke as the Theta representative at Take Back the Night. The evening was frantically managed, with speakers from what seemed like every organization on campus standing up to say that—surprise!—they were all against sexual ...

I’m angry for my brother’s television set with its lumpy men.
He is supposed to be excited for my visit.
He likes his rehab friends,
two of them play chess
under the ping pong table,
feet sticking out arbitrarily.

Amore e Mona Lagia e Guido ed io
Possiam be ringraziare un Ser costui
Che n’ha partiti, sapete da cui?
Nol vo’ contrar per averlo in oblio.
Poi questi tre più non v’hanno disìo;
Ch’eran serventi di tal guisa in lui,
Che veramente più di lor non ...

A French damsel and I decided to take a train
To New York to see the Gates and be at play.
You were late to the Dinky and had to book
It to meet me by the stop to pause, smoke, and spring
Off the platform—covered in Bohemian clothes ...

At dawn she sneaks blood oranges
From the grange-

We were sixteen when they evacuated the gymnasium
in the middle of the English exam (anonymous bomb
threat, year after Columbine). I was writing on Roethke –
not the poem we’d read in class and most everyone agreed
told the story of an abusive father and forgiving son,
but one ...

In the French, tu me manques –
you are missing to me.
You are missing to me,
to my body, to my arms
which starve on air,
to my eyes which dream up
the shape of you in everything.
You are missing
to my fingertips and the roots
of my hair ...

Sig loves me. He’s sitting at the counter, eating a bagel right now, but I know he’s thinking about me. Today, like every Sunday, he sits all day here in this café where I work. A man across the coffee shop is pulling his knit cap down over ...

Tilty Gringot frowns at the fresh face of the morning and draws shut the curtains. He is an ambler and a shuffler, Tilty, and as he walks from the window to the kitchen small flurries of dust obscure his feet and gather about the legs of his pajama pants. He ...

Those pills, those—what were they?—those pills we ate are going crazy. My limbs are, like, exploding off me. I feel great. You look very pretty now. I mean, I feel great! How do you, how do you feel?
Not going to speak to me? Is mums the word ...

Coming up a stairwell, I stop. A custodian, a man holding a feather duster, has also stopped at the midway landing to let two women pass. They descend to the landing, past the man and the duster, then past me, and I recall nothing of them but a single red ...

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He presses his wrist into my breast
and wraps his hand around my neck
palm and fingers enfolding my ivory veil.
His eyes devour the lights from three wax candles,
one burning with a viridian flame.
Unaware of the wind licking his hair,
cast by the open and close of ...