Angel Lemke

“Tucker highlights that 'white names and sensibilities are used as lube for the ears and sensibilities of white audiences dying to be penetrated by Black experience'.”
― Paul Baker, Camp!: The Story of the Attitude that Conquered the World

“[Trump] and his ideas are not exceptional. He and the people who support him are just the latest examples of the country's ongoing betrayal. . .When we make Trump exceptional, we let ourselves off the hook. For he is us, just as surely as the slave-owning Founding Fathers were us, as surely as Lincoln with his talk of sending Black people to Liberia was us, as surely as Reagan was us with his welfare queens. When we are surprised to see the reemergence of Klansman, Neo-Nazis and other White Nationalists, we reveal our willful ignorance about how our own choices make them possible.”
― Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own

“The enemy is conventional language; the antidote is poetry and mild intoxicants.”
― Douglas Glover, Attack of the Copula Spiders: Essays on Writing

“There is a moment following tragedy that some people never get to experience. You have to be ready for it or it will crush you to dust. It's like a window flung open and naked to the day. It's like being lifted away. It's like being stranded with everything you need. It's the moment you call a cornfield beautiful because you mean it, because you've never seen the world like this before, because newness no longer strikes terror but rather brings hope. You jerk awake into it like meeting yourself on a blind date. You surrender to that sudden first rush of joy without consequence, no more doom or fear or guilt, surrender to the sheer devastating presence of life, huge and indifferent, pushing into you like God's breath.”
― Sung Yim