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Kaleem Hawa

Kaleem Hawa has written about art, film, and literature for the New York Review of Books, The Nation, and Artforum, among others.



Articles Available Online


Hating it Lush: On Tel Aviv

Essay

May 2023

Kaleem Hawa

Essay

May 2023

I   They made the desert bloom, tall sparkling towers and clean Bauhaus lines, and apple-ring acacias, and teal blue shuttle buses, and stock...

Poetry

Issue No. 28

Three poems from issue 28

Sarah Barnsley

Valzhyna Mort

Kaleem Hawa

Poetry

Issue No. 28

Valzhyna Mort, ‘Music for Girl’s Voice and Bison’   Sarah Barnsley, ‘Virginia Woolf Has Fallen Over’   Kaleem Hawa,...

To kiss you should not involve such fear of imprecision I shouldn’t mind about the gallery attendant He is not staring That’s not what his torch and lanyard is for   I have seen at least four people holding hands already and I’m only just out of the revolving doors They weren’t unpeeling to the root To kiss you should not feel like anything other than embellishment They, people, loads of people, have staged kiss-ins at Sainsbury’s and in Southbank cafés precisely in solidarity with my freedom to kiss you They kissed en masse on Valentine’s Day with a hashtag and everything When that historian shot himself in Notre Dame two years ago, when Larousse dictionary mooted changing the definition of marriage, he was not thinking of me tarrying in this gallery gift shop, flicking postcards and studiously not-looking at you Larousse dictionary’s colophon is a woman blowing at a dandelion clock Have I used colophon correctly? Where are you   Dandelion comes from the French dent-de-lion, lion’s teeth   I am not biding my time   A lion would not baulk at kissing you, toothily   The French for dandelion is pissenlit This translates, broadly, as wet the bed I will wait   I could kiss you lightly, the side of your face, as if putting out a fire The gallery attendant is not looking at us I have spotted another couple kissing, a boy and a girl, like it was nothing, like they didn’t have to think about lions   When you puff at a dandelion clock, puff at its puff, it looks like you’re blowing a kiss   To kiss you would be plotlessness, and nothing like falling   The gallery attendant is not sizing up our haircuts In fact he’s looking the other way   The move was mine to make,   all gallery-hushed and happy as I reached for you   and   RIGHT   LET’S                                                                                

Contributor

November 2019

Kaleem Hawa

Contributor

November 2019

Kaleem Hawa has written about art, film, and literature for the New York Review of Books, The Nation, and...

after Mahmoud Darwish    Why is a boy an exclamation,  and why are his dead a period?,  why do his sinews tighten when he sees  a Palestinian body? Does his vision narrow  because of their flight,  or because their world is raining with salt?  Why is a boy with a gun different  from a boy with a jail cell?,  if the tools of rupture are our arms for  repurposing the body, and the arms of  the state are our means of repurposing the male,  are we finally useful and breathing and nervous…?  Does the white mean Night’s arrival?,  or does night signal the white’s escape?,  and when that white city boy becomes  a White City man,  does the hate in his heart subside?,  or does it become an ellipses,  a Bauhaus history of stories started  and left unfinished 
You Arrive at A White Checkpoint and Emerge Unscathed

Prize Entry

November 2019

Kaleem Hawa


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Interview

Issue No. 1

Interview with Mai-Thu Perret

Timothée Chaillou

Interview

Issue No. 1

Swiss artist Mai-Thu Perret’s ongoing, fourteen year-old project The Crystal Frontier is a multi-disciplinary fiction chronicling the lives of...

Interview

March 2013

Interview with Billy Childish

José da Silva

Interview

March 2013

Buzzed in through the red metal door and down the stone steps into the bunker that is L-13. The...

Interview

August 2013

Interview with Marvin Gaye Chetwynd

Ben Eastham

Interview

August 2013

Four or so years ago, at what was then the single Peckham establishment to serve a selection of sandwiches...

 

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