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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,...

POET AS CYBORG PORNSTAR   It starts with the turn Their slender edges, the slow reveal from margin to bombshell, the hormonal show of the real: whatever it is, you know it’s fucking hot I promise, I would do anything to get you off I am peeling my skin 4 u Let’s talk about it: how we fabricate intimacy, the wet scapes of the world scolded back to rigid, flashy                                                         direction Don’t                                                         you think every hero must grow to love their algorithm? Chemical action without consequences, good feeling, bad feeling—young, dumb, and full of poems! With her long French tips and how their bodies work Outsource ur erotics to the moneymakers This month, we are proud to be partnering with Donna Haraway in building a new kind of human-shaped sex robot who wants to write poems Would a friend catch the dog-ear, unreadable script, whir of systems, artificially leathered voice—       POEM AS ZERESHK POLLO   The white owner of the Persian restaurant says they keep wages low to avoid gentrifying the area with higher prices I think of the recipe from the place I used to wait: zereshk (barberries, or you can use dried cranberries if you can’t find barberries), saffron (use yellow food colouring as an alternative) Keep them guessing You are a classical text in the emperor’s encoded vision—sour red berries reclining on a carpet of chicken thighs, jewels set in broth like simmering gold If European culture generally has digested the Orient, what am I but a ferment of exotic things? A dish, a soul, a curated image—every time I chop and fry an onion I have to wonder what it means for my place in the market So what do you think? I mean, of all these grains, letters, this hot tahdig, this oil fallen into syntactic place, this formal glaze beneath which bubbles the threat that in some mouths even this could tell an unintended joke? Every way I look I can feel the cool twist, the crisp euphemism of middle-class taste, and I wonder how much this too will sell for How much would you pay? How good will it look on your plate?     GHAZAL                                                               My eyes were very stop look smell

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


READ NEXT

feature

January 2013

A Black Hat, Silence and Bombshells : Michael Hofmann at Cambridge & After

Stephen Romer

feature

January 2013

The black hat and the black coat I was familiar with, before I knew their owner. It was Cambridge,...

poetry

Issue No. 8

The Cloud of Knowing

John Ashbery

poetry

Issue No. 8

There are those who would have paid that. The amount your eyes bonded with (O spangled home) will have...

Interview

Issue No. 1

Interview with China Miéville

Ben Eastham

Interview

Issue No. 1

It is a cliché to say that a writer’s work resists classification. It is ironic then that China Miéville,...

 

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