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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,...

For Stephen Samuel Gordon: Spaceape   Sun Ra was on the ark Prince Nico Mbarga, he was on the ark So was Art Taylor and Sonny Simmons, and Bessie Smith and Superblue, all on the ark and Joe Tex and Mitty Collier, Leon Thomas and the Roaring Lion, even Robert Aaron and Lou Ciccotelli were abdominally on the ark The Original Defosto himself was also on the ark, beat rivers of song upon the omele drum, just a cutlass carpenter, no skill with timber, four eyed fish were on the ark Who playing war and fraid blood? Who playing mas and fraid powder? Who prevaricate and ruse, throwing holi powder as ritual upon the ark, but don’t want ink or powder to touch their clothes? Who else was on the ark? Max Roach was on the ark, and Ras Shorty I and David Rudder, Belafonte and Dolphy, them was high up upon the boat Babatunde! was on the ark, Olatunji! mama drum, say you coming to come and you never reach, as far as the leader house, his records and sawed off speaker box, to boom dub roots all around the village – bachelor life – and then you hear he bulling some woman in the congregation, and the shepherd sanding crook-sticks and tapping his foot when the hymn swing, but is suffer he suffering in silence, because while he in church, his woman horning him with the leader, and he don’t need to be a see-er man to see, make him burn his own house down, his hand was good, he was on the ark Bheti was on the ark, and Vino in pyjamas, the wild moon, fever in his throat Performance poet and Stand Up Comic, both were on the boat And the ark was full, but more was to come and they coming still Ethel Waters was on the ark, Octavia Butler, hip good, up upon this boat Slinger Francisco, robed in African wax print and dancing as man, Eric Williams, dead and living same time, also wrapped in kente Larry Lee, masked

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


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poetry

May 2013

Flatlands

Saskia Hamilton

poetry

May 2013

Horses and geese in a sodden field. Solitaries with luggage on a wet platform. Postage-stamp house on a bit...

Art

January 2017

New Communities

Robert Assaye

Art

January 2017

DeviantArt is the world’s ‘largest online community of artists and art-lovers’ and its thirteenth largest social network. Its forty...

Interview

November 2016

Interview with Dodie Bellamy

Lucy Ives

Interview

November 2016

The summer of 2016 was for me the Summer of Dodie Bellamy. I am a New York resident, but...

 

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