This site’s still a work-in-progress, but here’s some of my favorite stories (i.e. ‘greatest hits’):
Not-So-Simple Perfection
It’s not an emotional seriousness but more like the seriousness of hard rock. Elements, after all, have no capacity for irony.
(GLASS Quarterly, Dec. 2020)
Voices resound where before they had been silenced.
(Art New England, 2020)
At 17 my forehead was acned, my complexion spotty. You wouldn’t know it from looking at my senior picture.
(Newport Daily News, 2019)
Cringing in the Cushing
“I’m under Japanese influence and my honor’s at stake!” screeches a deranged David Bowie on 1977’s “Blackout.” How truly weird that this nugget of expatriate songwriting would prove clairvoyant for Ariana Grande in 2019. (Newport Daily News, 2019)
She was a private woman. What would she think of Rough Point’s annual show-and-tells of her stuff?
(Newport Daily News, 2019)
I AM MY BELOVED’S,
MY BELOVED IS MINE
The portrait presents a woman as refined as she is unreachable, sentenced to eternal sitting. The lack of overt emotion invites our unanswerable questions. (Mercury, 2019)
REVIEWED: “Venus” by Anna Kunz
Venus abounds in the history of painting, but these mostly male interpretations often reduce her to a reified feminine ideal. Venus’ aqueous influence over the fire of masculinity, the lyrical violence of her birth (born from pieces of castrated flesh), the power she wields over men and over life itself—these are absent in scores of depictions.
(Big Red & Shiny, Feb. 2018)
Mom and Dad whirled around. They glanced. They pondered. Then a shrug, a sneer. They moved on to other artworks.
(Mercury, 2018)
Headlines I don’t usually write, so thanks to my editors (like Sarah Baker, Andrew Page and Janine Weisman) for those. Teaser images sourced from Digital Comic Museum—an awesome resource for public domain, Golden Age comics.
Alexander Castro is a writer, critic and sometimes curator living outside Providence, RI.
I’ve written about artworks, artists and exhibits in New England since 2014. My byline has appeared on hundreds of stories since then, in dailies, weeklies, glossy mags and online publications.
My non-journalistic writing has popped up in a few places too, like Lost Balloon and Toronto’s untethered.
In my spare time, I make video essays and art for ideas and interests regular writing can’t contain.