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World-renowned activist Issa Amro was dragged away by 15 armed Israelis, blindfolded, gagged, and cuffed so tightly he now needs an operation on his hands. Now, Amro joins MintPress to recount the horrifying realities faced by Palestinians at the hands of their Israeli occupiers.
The post The Nakba 2.0: Issa Amro’s Insider Account of Israeli Torture in Hebron appeared first on MintPress News.
Organizers swore off violence, but the cops used their garden tools as an excuse to attack them anyway.
The post Cop City Protesters Tried to Plant Trees. Atlanta Police Beat Them for It. appeared first on The Intercept.
What is it about Alice Oswald’s poetry that is so immensely compelling? It could be the tautness, the hard brightness, of the language, the sense that every word in every line is earned, desperately necessary, a matter of urgency. It could be the fact that the poems are consistently so beautiful, so flinty and beautiful. They have the flexibility and the rangy toughness of plant life—and more often than not, Oswald seems inclined to work in book-length poems or sequences, letting an entire environment take root, out of which voices and lyrics flourish and emerge, both unexpected and inevitable. Though she loves the natural world, and loves to work in it—as a professional gardener—and write about it, Oswald is not a Romantic poet, at least not in the Wordsworthian sense. She doesn’t want to let her own voice smother the world in a cataract of discourse. Wants, rather, to let her syntax let her listen, to be a tool of a listening that is not only a getting out of the way, but also a record of boggling diversity of possibility in the created world. This means that poetry in her hands is intelligent but not intellectual, sometimes slow-burning but never slack.
We all know that women are burdened with a litany of unrealistic beauty standards: thin waists, big lips, smooth skin, silky hair, and the most egregious, vaginas that look like big, sensual flowers.
It’s like how one celebrity decided that low-cut jeans were a thing, and then we had to deal with them for years. Once the standard is out there, it can feel impossible to escape it. You can’t walk into any venerable art museum without becoming insecure about your genitals (and boobs—those Greco-Roman statues are so damn perky).