Molly McArdle

On the phone, Saeed Jones and I talk about Difficult Women, and the kind of female characters Gay writes about. “In almost every story,” he observes, “there’s a silent kind of gazing between women in different contexts.” Sisters, the wives of brothers, a man’s two partners, a fitness instructor and the new woman in class—the list is easy to populate—and “often men don’t know what’s even going on.” He distinguishes this gaze from the way men look at women—with the power of the sun—direct, intense, nonreciprocal. Gay’s women, Jones argues, look back at each other, at us. It’s an exchange. “They’re aware,” he says. “It changes the dynamic.” I recognize that same quiet, collaborative, destabilizing gaze from the Center for Fiction reading in 2012; from Gay’s work as an editor; from the writing itself. In fiction and in real life, Gay creates spaces for us to look at each other, to create trust, to take risks. “To read Roxane Gay’s work is to be read by Roxane Gay,” Jones says. And what a gift it is.

“I’m not good talking with this,” the Nasti of today says, miming typing on a keyboard. “I’m good talking like this”—and his hands go broadly gestural. “I’m Italian,” he explains (unnecessarily). Later he puts on his half-moon spectacles and squints through them, grabbing one end of his voluminous, storybook mustache for emphasis. “Don’t I look like Geppetto?”

ACT UP was successful because it tolerated difference. You have to have coalitions in order to make change in America. If we love and identity people with HIV and other oppressed people, we can help transform the epidemic.— Sarah Schulman

What is the role of a novelist in the United States today?

The role of the novelist is to write well, about what’s important to you, in the way that’s alive to you. Experimenting with things and long sentences, whatever you want to call it, that’s just me. It doesn’t change because of who’s in power. What changes is, if novelists are given a microphone to talk about things–even if that microphone doesn’t have a wide reach–you should talk. A great example to follow is Junot Díaz. He’s very vocal about his community, my community. But there’s another layer—just because you’re a novelist doesn’t mean you’re not a human being. What percentage of your time do you dedicate to battling the forces of evil? We have jobs, we have families, we have novels we want to write. We have to be able to answer that question. How much do I think I can give?

I spontaneously bought a bottle of Moët, packaged in a bent-up box thick with dust, the afternoon of Tuesday, November 8. I was walking down Church Avenue in Kensington past my local pharmacy (where I was greeting with a “Salaam! Have you voted?”), a Bangladeshi dress boutique, a Polish deli, a halal butcher, a Jewish center, a 50-year-old pizzeria, when the surge of optimism rose in me. By Wednesday morning, I had taken the bottle out of the fridge and hidden it somewhere I couldn’t see. And I cried. I have cried so much since then. 

To describe the events of last Tuesday as anything other than a tragedy is to lie. On Election Day, a new coalition of white voters—many of whom crossed party lines—elected an unstable, fraudulent, serial liar and misogynist who campaigned on racist nationalism. It is a resounding loss for everyone who believes that the United States is at its best when it is at its most diverse and most equitable, and a shift in power that deeply threatens this country’s most vulnerable. Many of us are afraid, all of us are uncertain of what will come next. 

And so we turn to art: for comfort, for inspiration, for fuel.

What is the role of poetry in the world that was forged this past Tuesday? What is the function of art in a country that has turned against, cannibal-like, its other half?

On November 8, as I cooked my way through the day—having voting, waiting for the votes to come in—I listened to a full recording of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” and a special episode of Nate DiMeo’s Memory Palace; I stumbled upon it without thinking. (It was next in my podcast queue.) It was the best, or least bad, hour and 38 minutes of my day. Encyclopedic, democratic, overfull, it fit the contours of my searching, distracted, frenzied attention. “The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them, / And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.”

Brooklyn Magazine published its first poem in our April 2015 print issue: Tyehimba Jess’s “Millie McKoy & Christine McKoy recall meeting Blind Tom, 1877.” Since then, we’ve published more, from Joey de Jesus, Khadijah Queen, José Olivarez, Wendy Xu, Metta Sáma, Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, and Rae Leone Allen. Today, Brooklyn Magazine presents these poems for the first time online: free and accessible and more-or-less forever.

I revisit these poems and find the same kind of—not quite relief but—answer I found in Whitman. One poem, Allen’s “Beware of Poachers,” powerfully rebukes our present. (There, in pamphlet, the speaker warns of “homosapiens…PHENOTYPICALLY DEVOID of MELANIN” who are “CONVINCED & DANGEROUS.”) Another, Jess’s poem, reaches back to a time (the very end of the Reconstruction and very beginning of Jim Crow) that feels eerily like our own. He dramatizes a kind of circus-tent intersectionality: Blind Tom, a pianist born into slavery and held as a ward by various white profit-mongers until his death, meets the conjoined McKoy twins. “We are the lucky ones,” they say, referencing Tom’s legal status as well as their own physical bodies, “free of the worst bondage.” Inextricably bound to each other, they ask: “We’re the self-owned, / – I guess. Aren’t we?” 

In between the mirrored then and now, we present poems about desire (the excerpt from Queen’s I’m So Fine, Olivarez’s “summer love”), about witness (Willis-Abdurraqib’s “Rapture,” Sáma’s “Witness”), about the act of artistic creation (de Jesus’s “materia III”) and inheritance (Xu’s “Poem for Fathers”). 

We have so many more poems, poets, to come. For this, at least, I can look forward to the coming months.

“I really love things that are frivolous and fun,” Chang explains. “I love Gossip Girl. I love pretty clothes. I love shiny things.” But more than merely appreciating the shiny, Wangs vs. the World is also about the value of shiny-ness. “The assignation of value is essentially subjective,” she explains. “That’s why I wanted to write about the art world, about finance. They are really similar. I wanted to write about people who were insiders in that world.”

Outside, after the show, there’s snow on 6th Avenue: soap bubbles shoot over the sidewalk and street from above the famous neon marquee. Children and adults hold out their hands to catch the wet bits of white as they float down. One little girl collects enough of the faux-snow to build herself a white beard and slick down her hair. Surprise, delight, flit across people’s faces—only now, unlike in the darkened theater, it’s visible. Like all things to do with the Rockettes, it’s an effect produced by hard work, but with results that feel, and look, like magic.