“They’re Not Normal People”: Azazel Jacobs’s French Exit

By Madeline Whittle

FEB 2021 | Film

An exceptional ensemble cast—including Michelle Pfeiffer and Lucas Hedges—renders the absurd with singular emotional nuance (and comic timing) in Azazel Jacobs’s latest, co-written by and adapted from a novel by Patrick DeWitt.

Gaby Collins-Fernández: To A Portrait

By David Whelan

DEC 22–JAN 23 | ArtSeen

Gaby Collins-Fernández’s solo exhibition To A Portrait unraveled my defenses. Borders give me a sense of calm and control, but the six wall-height paintings on view at Anonymous escape these boundaries, giving a broader dimension to one’s psychic, emotional, and bodily life. Words and images entwine and stretch past their limits, shattering into fragments of human desire. The work sneers at my guarded caution in its excess, passing up my small world for one with much more fascinating, beautiful complication.

THREE POEMS

By Simon Pettet

SEPT 2023 | Poetry

Simon Pettet is a New York based poet, the author of Hearth and As A Bee. These short poems are from an upcoming collection.

Sandcastles: Afghanistan, One Year On

By Matthew Byrne

SEPT 2022 | Field Notes

A symbolic twenty years after 9/11, the Biden administration formally ended the United States’ war in Afghanistan, withdrawing the last of its troops from the south-central Asian nation. Melancholy anniversaries serve as reminders of missed opportunities, and this one is no different. Here, however, blunders appear frivolous when compared to the extraordinary corruption and pitiless violence perpetrated by US-backed forces in the region. While much has been made of the shockingly haphazard exit, the ease with which the Taliban seized Kabul, and the grim prospects for women, for girls, and for Afghans who worked with coalition forces, the cardinal sin of the war was not how it ended, but how it began.