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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,...

Why I’m Not A Great Lover   The circumstances The zeitgeist   The inner uncertainty The lack of belief in something after   Literature The wrong music at the wrong time The creaking chandelier in the next room   The shouting of drunks down in the street The frost patterns on the window The poem by Rossetti By John Donne   The thought of giant octopuses Of umbilical cords Of porridge   The squeaking of the bedsprings The bitter smell of oranges consumed this morning The tons of soap, accumulated in the course of an entire life The three-legged dog, seen in a park fifteen years ago   The power outage in ’98 The atmosphere in the apartment in winter around four o’clock in the afternoon   The cold, insect-speckled light of the fluorescent tubes above us The toys under the bed in the box The neck muscle pains The sea     *     A Sentence from the Great French Encyclopédie of 1756   The human population on the planet is, in its size, constant and will remain constant until the end of humanity when no one is left on this earth     *     Theory of Literature   An infinite number of monkeys with typewriters, it is said, would ultimately produce the complete works of Shakespeare   And shortly thereafter the work of Dante, followed by Joyce, Goethe, Kafka, Dickens, Dostoyevsky   Then, after a few months, a few pieces of their own about things like paws, trees or eternal repetition Then a little Dostoyevsky again and all of Shakespeare, once again from the beginning, line by line   In between pieces about trees, about paws, about bananas, and about eternal repetition     *     These poems were selected for inclusion in the January 2015 Translation Issue by Daniel Medin, a contributing editor of The White Review He helps direct the Center for Writers and Translators at the American University of Paris, and is an editor of The Cahiers Series and Music & Literature

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

poetry

January 2012

Tynemouth Lodge

W. N. Herbert

poetry

January 2012

‘Sometimes I go to the tavern and get drunk.          What of it?’                                 Nesimi 1 Bars tend us...

feature

January 2014

Afterword: The Death of the Translator

George Szirtes

feature

January 2014

1. The translator meets himself emerging from his lover’s bedroom. So much for fidelity, he thinks. 2. Je est...

feature

February 2015

A Closer Joan

Shawn Wen

feature

February 2015

Here are a few of the Joans I know. The girl who arrives at Port Authority Bus Terminal in...

 

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