As a poet and essayist, my work is rooted in the impact feminism has had on my life as a man, particularly as a survivor of childhood sexual violence. As a literary co-translator, I write about the relevance of classical Persian poetry to our contemporary lives.
I’ve Been Thinking About Sex
I am trying to remember the first time I understood, really understood, that sex was nothing but touch, that I wanted the sex I had to be about finding ways to touch people that would leave them feeling fully and deeply and irrevocably known inside and out, recognized, validated, appreciated as a human body, a being […]
from “Cattle of The Lord,” by Rosa Alice Branco
I stroll from street to street,
the trees spill themselves on the asphalt road.
Sooner or later the leaves
will end up swept away from the sidewalk.
Let’s call their disappearance wind.
Let’s go on giving names to all
we’ve lost in the name of words.
—Rosa Alice Branco, from Cattle of the Lord (translated by Alexis Levitin)
I Just Learned About the Equal Justice Initiative — If You Don’t Know About It, You Should
In “The Lines That Antisemitism and Racism Draw,” a series of letters I composed during the summer of 2016 that were published in December of that year, I wrote about the stolpersteine, an art project started by the German artist Gunter Demnig in 1992. According to Wikipedia, the project “aims at commemorating individual persons at exactly […]