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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,...

DEDICATION   Flamingo, urchin, bestiaric beast: Paroling city matters, you re-form From pigeon’s dirty feather to a quill   A parlour game: we reach the dovetailing Between those singing spasmic pities that We summon, and the dank urbanity   You wreak It comes to punish this reserve Love: whether zoo, circus, menagerie, All matters of a name more so than form,   Let us rush towards autowilderness, Strifed with wet, chaostic humours 1 Erotic prescience : I sense us : one   We’ve taken flyte, so let us rest in shelter, Into the original of the world, Nothing can stop our loved country from mattering   ONE   *   There is a woman turning a woman turning itself on   Sick hydra starting up    I dream of sea becoming seaworthy to sea   The sea drownsy    in its offensive capability   Drownsy Baby        thirsting in its sleep        Hush now   Totemic fetish or mnemonic logo    :    her offensive cheep    :    untid’ly starting up for the tide    :                cheap   *   You cannot scry in your own silver when its ripples split the vision   They cannot peer into a depth they’ve mined        and filled Selfsang in their own gags        Dull drams overfilled —spilling unward   Eat your eyesight, bastard            Ring yourself unfit   *   Q: Where has this water gone? Why disappear?   A: Add an arch to the middle of valour There’s your answer       In the mean time, build a city        Then build a countryside for balance   Now, not sea at all                They become   ardor’s coldened shoulder            Ardor eccentric Radiating inward   Throttling at different purposes and speeds   *   TWO   An altared state urned in a loss of verse Severed then served with coming of the morning My love has earned this insurrective swerve That seeks to crash the calming of his mourning   *   You rest inequality   If I was embedded in a painscape, it’d be different   Q: Where do you rest? A: Camped out in the bedazzled house of his runtish fantasy   His House Believes   As it is now, there is an asterisk to every kiss     Let me rest in that nest of those pink, electric branches   There, there is safety   *   THREE   To have a handle on something is to have the capacity to turn it on or off   *   What I    cuse him of I    cuse myself   *   When they are together, their shape is endless and content   The sea drinking the sea                    The sea is drinking the sea   *   The vulvic octopus dies with her young Meanwhile, I:    waste    with my    youth   The staggering dear does not accept my hand, fawning

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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poetry

February 2016

[from] What It Means to Be Avant-Garde

Anna Moschovakis

poetry

February 2016

This is an excerpt from the middle of a longer poem. The full poem is in Moschovakis’s forthcoming book,...

Interview

February 2017

Interview with Hajra Waheed

Rebecca Travis

Interview

February 2017

This conversation with Hajra Waheed began in person with an opportune meeting at her Montreal studio in April 2016....

fiction

January 2016

Dimples

Eka Kurniawan

TR. Annie Tucker

fiction

January 2016

Moments ago, the woman with the lovely dimples had been shivering, utterly ravaged by the evening, but now her...

 

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