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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,...

Letter from a New City to an Old Friend     [SEAside          Gra-                         -im Ronny Burhop 1987-2010                                                                      ffiti]   [adjust             Even the white noise here is different—        trACKing] there’s no boulevard, no blue and breathing ocean The streets—more quiet now, winding through rain, hidden parks and open markets— [chriiiiiiiing] are cobbled, and twist off into alleys less sinister than ours There’s history [REprise] in the street names, true—but the mystery, the footsteps’ muffled click, the concrete sea bRZeE rolling below my window is tame, bloodless… [BRiX ‘98] We fell off the world for years in LA [SoDen I can only remember the haze now,             eAcH       corP how our vista was never really clear                                       oWn of smog, or planes, or neon bellied clouds                                           a sOul?]   I split Left you standing with a pocket [My grambag                full of lock-                            of                  less keys, a few bucks, two lighters and I tRixY                         drove the forty miles back home Years later, rEds]                                        I’m hoping, perhaps we can just look back,                                         tuchhhh—                                                                                —MIDAZ recall it before the cards were flipped— our own Cassidy and Sundance era?    (EPIX x I turned my back on California,                             X) on those two-for-one, from out the Honda [Malverde]       hustlers, sunburned illegals, los santos… And I have thought about nothing else, since   I heard about your dazzling surrender [oUr buRnT-    Guess I should ask ‘from whose bourn’ and all that, but I can’t fucking see how it matters oUt      SCAPE]                                                           Anyways, it’s probably December right now in your coastal town, every crow                 * JauREZ— crowding the power lines, jostling Each one                                       Bosnia vacant, thinking only of its single                    del SUR* green walnut, the distance to the pavement                             ‘grAFT’                                                             -NoV16, 2009-    

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

July 2014

The Fast, the Furious and the Power of Frivolity

Orlando Whitfield

feature

July 2014

The six chapters that comprise the Fast & Furious franchise thus far (a seventh is due for release in...

fiction

May 2016

See Inside for Holiday Special

Joanna Quinn

fiction

May 2016

We are not tourists. We are journalists. We fly out from Heathrow, Bristol, Glasgow and Newcastle to foreign airports...

Art

September 2016

Sitting, scrawling, playing

Emily Gosling

Art

September 2016

Amidst the drills and concrete, white walls and big names of London’s Cork Street stands a new gallery, Nahmad Projects,...

 

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