Victims of a Commodified Society by David Morgan

Essays

On 28 July 2025, four people were killed in a mass shooting in their Park Avenue office tower in central Manhattan. Among the victims were Wesley LePatner, a senior executive at Blackstone and a mother of two, and Didarul Islam, an off-duty police officer working in private security who served as a building guard and management employee. The gunman, Shane Devon Tamura, aged twenty-seven, ended his own life after the attack. Like so many similar incidents, this was not merely another chapter in the relentless American cycle of gun violence…It has now become, at least for this writer, a parable of what happens when people are reduced to functional market value and usage: a world where human beings come to see themselves, and are seen by others, as assets or failures, winners to be rewarded or discards to be forgotten.

Homesick, USA by Liam A. Faulkner

Essays

Grief has been on our minds lately, both my patient’s and mine. In addition to the anguish inherent in his transatlantic move and resultant “regressus ad uterum,” our work has also touched upon the grief we share with many of our fellow Americans at the loss of another home, another nurturing womb: that of the very country he grew up in and to which I moved.

Photo by Luca Campioni

TYRANNY: A CONFESSION by Diane Seuss

Poems

Diane Seuss is a poet whose most recent collection, Four-Legged Girl (Graywolf Press, 2015) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her second book, Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open, (U. of Ma. Press, 2010) won the Juniper Prize. Her fourth collection, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in May 2018. She has published widely in literary magazines including Poetry, The Iowa Review, and The New Yorker. Diane lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.