ince moving to the United States, Khan has been working in art and poetry as a way to connect with the immigration experience. She frequently highlights and references the places she comes from: “I grew up in West Africa and Indonesia, my father is half Afghan, half Russian, and my mom is Filipino, Chinese, Spanish, and Indigenous.” In this piece, Khan uses woodburning to inscribe symbols on a table she created with discarded materials. Using symbology, she tells the story of her life milestones: adolescence, immigration, marriage, motherhood, divorce, and homeownership. The pandemic gave us the time we wanted and time we didn’t — to reflect on the past and what we want to accomplish in the future. Khan’s Small Rebellions helps bring us together as we experience the same milestones, the same pause. 

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With the lean, long jab and agile step of a boxer, Adrian Matejka delivers this knockout dramatization of the larger-than-life life of heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. In dexterous interpolating voices, and in forms ranging from enveloping sonnets to prose letters and interviews, Johnson emerges as a scrappy, hard-edged hero—troubled by his own demons but determined to win the “fight of the century,” a fight that underscored the bitter realities of racism in America. These poems don’t pull no punches.

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