PROTEAN

APRIL 26. 2025

Poetry Begins at STOP: Etel Adnan & Arabic

In "Poetry Begins at STOP: Etel Adnan & Arabic, " Huda Fakhreddine examines place, time, and anti-colonial memory in Arabic literature, concluding that "A poem in itself is survival, and a poem written post-extermination is a victory. "

APRIL 24. 2025

The Six Villages of Musa Dagh

To commemorate the 110th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, we're honored to publish Nyree Abrahamian's "The Six Villages of Musa Dagh, " a poem steeped in the long history of Armenian resistance to Ottoman-Turkish colonization.

APRIL 22. 2025

I Wish You’d Known the City: On The Films of Mohammad Malas

Syrian director Mohammad Malas's films attempt to preserve the memory of Quneitra, the Syrian town destroyed by Israel in 1974. With Israel again invading Syrian territory, Séamus Malekafzali introduces the filmmaker's mournful, & newly relevant oeuvre.

APRIL 18. 2025

Bandung’s Ghosts

From Issue V: The original ambitions laid out at the Bandung Conference, which began 70 years ago today, for a "Thirld World" movement were far more radical than the eventual historical incarnation. Pranay Somayajula examines the contradictions of nationalism and statehood that conspired to ensure the internationalist vision’s shortcomings.

APRIL 15. 2025

Carceral Health and Obscured Cruelty

Physician Jake Sonnenberg reviews All This Safety is Killing Us: Health Justice Beyond Prisons, Police, and Borders, which collects writings that cast light on the flagrant injustices of for-profit healthcare and its complicity with police and the state—from cops in hospitals and sting operations on pregnant women to forced sterilization.

APRIL 8. 2025

The Possession

Poet Ian Maxton's "The Possession" roams across the "spooked-out American map, " surveying the machinery of empire and the scorched landscapes it leaves behind.

APRIL 6. 2025

Bird Flu and Other Assorted Pestilences

What’s behind the current state of alarm around avian influenza? Abby Cartus examines the epidemiological science and how action is constrained by the political context—namely, RFK Jr. , the Trump administration, and the nation's worsening anti-science and anti-vaccine attitudes.

APRIL 4. 2025

Work, One

Poet Steph Sorensen's "Work, One" lyricizes the worker's inquiry to document the dull brutalities of a retail inventory job.

MARCH 31. 2025

Relief Maps of Time

James Davis reviews Fredric Jameson’s last collection, Inventions of a Present, from Verso. What can the novel, as “time’s relief map, ” still teach us about the contemporary fragmentation of meaning?

MARCH 23. 2025

“Where do you bury a little boy’s leg? ”

Invoking Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah's devastating question, "Where do you bury a little boy's leg? ," poet Nawel Abdallah meditates on the Zionist entity's unimaginable brutality towards Palestinian children.

MARCH 22. 2025

Disfigurations [Excerpt]

In this excerpt from his forthcoming project, Disfigurations, poet David Buuck seethes against the genocidal violence in Palestine and the inability of poetry to stop it.

MARCH 14. 2025

Compliant Mechanisms

Bradley Babendir compares two recent books that differ in their approach to critiquing the American pathology of entrepreneurialism and self-improvement: Erik Baker’s "Make Your Own Job" and Adam Chandler’s "99% Perspiration. "

FEBRUARY 27. 2025

Slumlord Empire

In this essay, Alberto Toscano and Brenna Bahndar explore how the ideology of real estate has come to find direct geopolitical expression in Trump’s crass drive to acquire territory as “property”—a turn back towards unmediated accumulation exemplified by the administration’s egregious “Gaza development plan. ”

FEBRUARY 9. 2025

Capital’s Grave [Excerpt]

In this excerpt from her newest title, Capital’s Grave, upcoming from Verso Books, Jodi Dean introduces her provocative new thesis: capital may not be dead, but it is digging its own grave.