The Brooklyn Rail

In Conversation

A Bard from East New York: Martín Espada

By Gabriel Thompson

Called “the Pablo Neruda of North American authors” by Sandra Cisneros, Martín Espada has published eight books of poetry, including Imagine the Angels of Bread, winner of an American Book Award, and Alabanza: New and Selected Poems 1982-2002, which received the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement.

There Goes My City

By David Freedlander

There is a certain morphology of New York narrative that finds its way mainly into magazines, the City section of the New York Times, and in conversation between old timers and relatively recent arrivals, that goes something like this: The best time ever to have lived in this city, and in this neighborhood more exactly, was the day I moved here.

How to End the War

By Paul Mattick

How did World War I come to an end? Nobody I ask knows the answer to this question. This isn’t surprising—people aren’t taught much history, and anyway it happened long ago.

In Conversation

TELESUR’S PROGRAM
Aram Aharonian with Nikolas Kozloff

Nikolas Kozloff, author of Hugo Chavez: Oil, Politics, and the Challenge to the U.S. (Palgrave, 2006), recently sat down with Aram Aharonian, the Director of Telesur, a satellite news station run by the governments of Venezuela, Uruguay, Argentina and Cuba.

RANT RHAPSODY
Occupational Hazards

By Mark Read

We had been in the holding cell at the 9th Precinct for maybe an hour or so when this lanky, punk-rock-circa-1983-looking dude (pale skin, gelled spiky jet black hair, metal-studded black leather jacket, metal-studded belt, black denim jeans, leather shitkicker boots) was escorted into the waiting area just outside the bars, a few feet away from my cellmates and me.

RANT RHAPSODY
Listening to Robinson

By Sabine Heinlein

Tyrone Robinson is a sturdy looking man almost six feet tall with a very dark complexion. He is 46 years old and maybe a bit chubby. It is hard to say, though, whether it is his body that makes his clothes bulge or all the stuff he carries in his pockets.

Debtor’s Nation

By Williams Cole

If you’re like most Americans, when you hand that piece of plastic to the cashier and they say “credit or debit” you’re likely to answer with the “c” word, burying the consequences of that purchase in a special part of your brain to be dealt with at a later time.