For the first six issues, since we debuted our journal in July 2016, The New Engagement has featured for its monthly online cover original photography and paintings provided by our talented and generous contributors. This month, the first of a new year, we are not just featuring our first illustration, but also one drawn by yours truly.
“Framed Patrician” is an illustration that speaks to not just the man who will become the 45th President of The United States this month but to the misguided psychology that created and enabled him. A social malady that is not new, a miasma that has plagued our species since time immemorial. Celebrity, wealth, and the allure of an aristocratic ancestry—whether real, imagined, or fabricated—have perverted what we value and know to be true, and cemented the distorted perception of nationalism, a zeal for specious upper class promise, and wanton bigotry. The patrician—actual or fantastical—succeeds in presentiment, in casting a stately and heroic patina, in glorious power, but fails in maintenance of a moral core, a righteous center, a fundamental decency. The rot is inevitable. The stink is unstoppable. The derangement is laid bare. ~ Brian Alessandro, Editor-in-Chief
“Framed Patrician”
Brian Alessandro
14 in x 18 in
Ink, colored pencil on paper
"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive."
~ James Baldwin
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Fiction, Poetry, Essays, Drama
“As an Act of Protest” has never been more urgent than now.
The Bulldog, the Cyclone, the Ocelot, and Tom. With dignity and mettle for all.
Centuries of cruelty demand centuries of reparation.
Grace is a dance in the face of adversity, a pirouette across a landscape of bigotry.
A sublime horror, a beautiful exploitation—sung to mellifluous perfection.
Dismantled binaries, reclaimed thoughts, decolonized language.
The New Engagement endeavors a novel approach to discovering, introducing, and showcasing writers, artists, and filmmakers, by providing them digital and print platforms, while encouraging and supporting their social-consciousness.