"Taïa brings the evil things out that few want to acknowledge, much less talk about: every kind of sex, every kind of death, the body in pleasure and pain, poverty, prostitution, torture, and Islamic fundamentalism. He exorcises our hush-hush shared experiences, and, as he does this, his myths screw with ours in their radical openness to difference."
interview
BOMB Magazine: Ohal Interview
"What I write comes together in what feels like real cavernous spaces with their own gravitational pull, regardless of where I am. These imagined spaces are important to me. When I begin working and get enraptured with a sound, playing around with it gradually reveals the space in which it's set, which in turn reveals more sounds and phrases that may belong in that space."
BOMB Magazine: Eka Kurniawan Interview
"Ghosts pour off the pages of Eka Kurniawan’s debut novel, Beauty Is a Wound. They rub at the windowpane and even play hands at the card table. Badly buried in the twentieth century, their “damaged bodies” have now arisen, seeking justice. And Kurniawan, in telling their stories, is giving it to them."
M&L: Interview with Avishai Cohen
"This interview took place high above Broadway Avenue in Manhattan, one afternoon before Cohen played three sets through midnight with the Mark Turner Quartet. We sat talking on a broad windowsill and shared a good view of a neighbor’s balcony garden, still blooming big in September. About halfway through the conversation, Cohen pulled out his trumpet case to show first the silver mute he uses to practice on airplanes, then a series of four mouthpieces cut into heavy pendants. At concerts and in most photographs, you can see Cohen wearing one of these things, tied long around his neck, falling somewhere to midchest. Not just oddly beautiful, they are apparently good for buzzing, and are much his own invention, tools of the trade to keep his lips in shape."
New Directions: Pneumatic Antiphonal with Sylvia Legris
"Legris anatomizes song—birdsong, but also the aspiring song of the poet. Is this an impossible task? Bones, soft tissue, and even spit can be pinpointed, but what about breath? motile air? pneuma or spirit? What about this:
Jizz of airborne lungs: venturi tube trachea; cul-de-sac lift / drag
ratio; emphysematic airflow.
– from “Lore: 7 (aspect ratio)”
The closer we get to anything in Legris’s anatomy, the more biting and mysterious it turns. True to life.
This interview took place over two spring months. Emails flew back and forth between Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where Legris lives and writes, and West Harlem."