Beholding Hope: A review of Jeffrey Levine’s At the Kinnegad Home for the Bewildered
In At the Kinnegad Home for the Bewildered, Levine begins his cinematic collection with the lifeblood line of the book in the second poem: “we know there is something more.” As he shifts in and out of the domestic and the divine in his poems, we feel a deep longing for kinship and connect with a speaker who is unabashed in his belief in what isn’t wholly known. Sometimes, we are located within a piece of art, and at other times, we are right in the middle of a myth or standing there, cooking in his kitchen.
The Social Distance Reading Series
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Notes from Isolation
All day I watch boats from the living room window. I do other things, of course, but I always come back to the boats—yachts, skiffs, catamarans. Occasionally, there’s even a dinghy, white or blue, with a small figure aboard, paddling madly.
I used to think there could be nothing lonelier than boating, but these days, I have reconsidered.
Do-gooders
Warm, radiant afternoon after days and days of rainy gloom,
the girls bursting with born-again good intention.
“I want to eat more vegetables. Carrots and broccoli and green beans,”
Giulia announces from her car seat.
Venison, Ham & Butter Beans
I wait. I listen. I look. Nothing happens. I think, so, this is hunting.
Review of THE LOSS OF ALL LOST THINGS by Amina Gautier
Maybe there is no hierarchy of suffering, no hierarchy of loss. Then again, of course there is. In “Lost and Found,” the first story in Amina Gautier’s lovely collection, The Loss of All Lost Things, a boy has been “plucked from the curb like a penny found on the sidewalk” by a strange man, pulled into a car, and taken away.
Three Poems
Nothing calls back to my dog when he barks / against the dark window glass.
Review of LOST AND FOUND by Andrew Merton
In October of 2013 I received an email from Andrew Merton—a journalist, essayist, poet and professor Emeritus of English at the University of Hampshire. Although he and I were not acquainted, he’d stumbled across one of my poems and reached out to tell me he was intrigued. “I think you may feel a small shock of recognition when you read my own poem, “‘Snow,'” he wrote…
West End
I dropped my car off for service. It was seven in the morning, and they told me to go get a cup of coffee, that my car would be ready soon.
The Sex Ed Lady
It was 3:20 pm, the time when we pooled in the parking lot, gridlocked and blasting music, looking for our friends.
Three Poems
It was easy to forgive prostitutes in Mexico, / in Amsterdam. Less easy was the money thrown around / On Avenida Presidente after driving down
Goat and Spoons
Goat was in her trunk, dying but still kicking. Every so often his hooves thumped against the seat backs then for agonizing minutes he’d lay still again.
Review of BECOMING LYLA DORE by Teri Youmans Grimm
Silent films are, for most of us, part of a quaint and distant past.