Review of Maze: an epitaph for the soul
Maze by Matt Bialer.Finishing Line Press, 2021. Matt Bialer’s Maze is a wonderfully composed epic in narrative prose to his late wife, to society, and memory, done in rhapsodic meter, intertwining a chorale that echoes throughout from Bosnia, to his wife’s...
The Social Virtues Series
Recent Posts
Two Poems
My aluminum-free/deodorant is made/of charcoal. Iterative/self-perceptions slam/into one another with/the incongruity of/perched hummingbirds.
A Review of G.C. Waldrep’s THE EARLIEST WITNESSES
Hailed by his contemporaries as a visionary poet, G.C. Waldrep aptly presents an intimate study of the literal, physical, and spiritual act and implications of seeing.
A Review of Jennifer Militello’s THE PACT
If you are someone like me who usually – but not always – closes her correspondence to friends and family with the word “love,” Jennifer Militello’s “The Pact” (Tupelo Press) might make you want to think about what it means when you use – or withhold – that word.
More Things I Would Tell You
I join a bereavement group
But I last for one session
Marriages over fifty years
Died suddenly
Brain aneurism
Long battle with cancer
I am the only one
Who isn’t crying
From “After Talk”
You touched my chest with your fingertips
as I lay next to you trying to sleep.
“Try to rest,” you said, by which you meant,
Gird your loins, my love, and prepare your heart,
for tomorrow I may leave you.
February Thaw
Outside, crowded maple trees
soften themselves and glisten.
Weeping, they unroll their leaves.
Poems in the Rooms of the Dying
On the subject of serial killers, poet Ruth Danon writes that they “leave notes, write in code.” They “grow increasingly impatient.”
“They hate the dark,” she muses. “They want to be found.”
So do poets. And Danon’s latest collection, Word Has It (Nirala Publications, 2018) reads like a series of notes dispatched from the brink of an apocalypse. Birds fall from the sky. Red-eyed people weep. There is blood. Dark, ominous omens of all shapes and sizes rain down.
Toad
It was six o’clock on a steamy January evening in Sao Paulo when Roland saw the toad. He was walking home along Alameda Santos with his ancient Nikon at the ready, searching for photographs. This was his pleasure after a sweaty day teaching English to...
A Review of Chris Campanioni’s The Internet is for real
In a time of deepfakes and alternative facts, we often ask ourselves what is real anymore, how can we trust our own eyes? Chris Campanioni chimes in on our collective existential crisis with his latest book of hybrid works, the Internet is for real in which he proposes, as the title indicates, perhaps the most sure thing in our world is that which is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. As if cutting and pasting a Pinterest of poetry, memoir, and essays, Campanioni invites us to join him through a pastiche of pop, pulp, and philosophy as he analyzes the internet and its impact on intrapersonal and interpersonal relationships, as well as identity within individual and cultural contexts.
Mystery, Menace, and Early Sorrow
*Notable Essay Best American Essays and Literary Nonfiction of 2018 The dolls never slept. They stayed wide eyed and unblinking on their shelf in my small, overheated room, watching me watch the man and woman in the apartment across the way. As a...
A Serious Piece of American Music
Amy Lemmon’s book of poems, The Miracles, is a meditation on life after loss, and its themes are motherhood, love, and aging. Lemmon writes, “The structure of the book was inspired by Leonard Bernstein’s Prelude, Fugue and Riffs (1949) for solo clarinet and jazz ensemble.”