Cover image: quilt art by Karen Maple featuring solitary incarcerated figures behind bars
Posing in Prison: Family Photographs, Emotional Labor, and Carceral Intimacy

The photographs they send are studio portraits taken by incarcerated photographers whose job in prison is to take pictures. Allen poses in these photographs sometimes with props, always in uniform. The backdrops are designed and painted by incarcerated people. They break up the uniformity and repetition of the prison attire and staged poses. There are also photographs from our visits to see Allen. In most of these, he stands in the center and we huddle around, hugging him as tightly as we can.

A triptych: the left photo is of two mangoes hanging from a tree. The middle is of two brown men. One is wearing an African mask, and the other kisses his throat. The image on the right is of three men, overlaid with a photo of grass.
Queering the Archive: Brown Bodies in Ecstasy: Visual Assemblages, and the Pleasures of Transgressive Erotics

Jordache A. Ellapen reflects on his photographic project, Queering the Archive: Brown Bodies in Ecstasy, which blends photographs from his family archive with contemporary portraits shot in a studio. The work examines the intersections of race, sexuality, and eroticism as they relate to the in/visibility of black and brown queer bodies and subjectivities in South Africa.

Beyond Wikipedia: Notes on Robert Lowell's Family
"Family connexions are part of the poetry of history," Noel Annan asserted in "The Intellectual Aristocracy", one of the most famous essays ever written on British culture. Fortunately or unfortunately, it would be fair to embellish Annan's point by adding that sometimes "family connexions are part of the history of poetry." That, at least, is what this post seeks to demonstrate.