Maurice Kilwein Guevara’s poetry merges magical realism with grotesque and speculative elements to interrogate violence, displacement, and fractured identity across the Americas. This article explores how his lyric work uses magic not as escapism but as a destabilizing force that renders violence uncanny and history nonlinear. Drawing on border theory, Bakhtin’s grotesque realism, and theories of magical realism, I argue that Kilwein Guevara crafts a poetics of subversion rooted in spectral presences, bodily metamorphoses, and ontological instability. From dead poets and talking insects to mutilated relics of familial love, his poems blur the lines between the real and the fantastic, amplifying both horror and wonder. Rather than resolve trauma, magic in his work intensifies its absurdity—while also reimagining relationality beyond humanist models. In so doing, Kilwein Guevara expands the political and aesthetic range of Latinx poetics, staging a border imaginary where monstrosity and enchantment pulse with shared urgency.
Numerous works have celebrated Frederick Douglass as a self-made abolitionist, orator, writer, and advocate for women’s rights and have associated him with ideals of manhood. Employing critical masculinity studies, Africana womanism, and the female gaze, this article argues that Jewell Parker Rhodes’s Douglass’ Women (2002) destabilizes Douglass’s masculinity and restores the voices of Anna Murray Douglass (his first wife) and Ottilie Assing (his German translator and intellectual companion). The novel reimagines how Douglass’s legacy relied on Anna’s fiscal, emotional, and logistical help and on Ottilie’s multifaceted support as an editor, translator, confidante, and lover. By restoring these women’s voices and drawing attention to the unequal gender relations at the heart of the famous reformer’s self-representation as an autonomous man, Rhodes’s work reveals the deep dependence of Douglass and the wider anti-slavery leadership on women.
The archetype of the cowboy as it was originally conceived in the late 19th century—unyielding, free-spirited, and courageous—may need an urgent revision in the new millennium. Far from destroying the American frontier hero par excellence, the third season of True Detective (2019) and Fallout (2024) offer a more nuanced, sensible, and sociable depiction of the cowboy that points towards the deconstruction of the archetype or, rather, to its updating within the context of the Trump era in corporatist America. In this essay, I analyze and describe how the cowboy myth is stripped of some of his traditional traits, particularly those associated with the relentless use of violence and a masculinity built upon a macho attitude.
