Writing in the voice of a chronicler of shades of old Hollywood (who sounds suspiciously like Hedda Hopper), Daniel Lavery resurrects old phantoms so that the gossip of yesterday overlays the gossip of today like an uncanny wavering in the hot air above a sidewalk in Los Angeles.

Wendy Vogel traces the history of the term “gossip,” reflecting on how its origins have shaped the collective understanding of whisper networks and #MeToo.

Drawing on breathless vernacular speech, richly painted images that seem to bloom and blow away as quickly as dandelion floss, and the rhythms and idioms of hip hop, Joseph Earl Thomas’s poem explores what it means to think and speak about other people in a few of the many languages of Black masculinity.