I loved visiting the Metropolitan Museum with my family when I was a young girl. Shortly after I moved to NYC for graduate school, I began writing in the museum while seeing an exhibit or visiting parts of the permanent … Read More
Please join us for a poetry reading featuring Susan Donnelly, Wendy Drexler, and Holly Guran reading new and recent work, on Wednesday, October 4, 7 p.m., at the Suffolk University Poetry Center/73 Tremont Street/Mildred F. Sawyer Library, 3rd floor The … Read More
Our oldest child came at the tail end of a snowstorm so large even my OB was snowed in and unable to reach the hospital in time for his birth. We spent a day and a night cocooned on the … Read More
In 2014, I went on a peace delegation to Palestine where I witnessed the choke-hold of military occupation, and it fundamentally changed how I looked at my privilege–it was no longer just a concept I acknowledged, it was an injustice … Read More
Callie and I were thirteen the summer of ‘87, the summer the Los Angeles Lakers won the World Championship. During the school months, we were required to wear the Saint Vibiana uniform, only the purple and gold of our … Read More
Prayer Book of the Anxious by Josephine Yu (Elixir Press, 2016). Letters from Limbo by Jeanne Marie Beaumont (Cavan Kerry, 2016). “Oh, but the heart isn’t fooled / by the gorgeous lies of poems,” Josephine Yu declares toward the … Read More
Whereas by Layli Long Soldier (Graywolf Press, 2017). Cold Pastoral by Rebecca Dunham (Milkweed Editions, 2017). Layli Long Soldier’s first collection tasks itself with writing back to and simultaneously interrogating official political speech. Whereas, as poem and collection, … Read More
Believe What You Can by Marc Harshman (Vandalia Press, 2016). Two Worlds Exist by Yehoshua November (Orison Books, 2016). Arsonville by David Blair (Western Michigan University Press, 2016). Embracing change in Appalachia. In his second full-length collection of … Read More
In the Language of My Captor by Shane McCrae (Wesleyan University Press, 2017). As I read Shane McCrae’s In the Language of My Captor, I thought of the Romanian poet Paul Celan writing in German, his first tongue … Read More
It was 1987, and I was eighteen years old. My parents made me get a post-graduation summer job in the cafeteria of the local college, a liberal arts school founded in the 1800s by a religious sect I’d never … Read More
Flower baskets drool petals and the teenage girl in her pink and black skull pajamas walks beneath the flowers without hurry. Parts of the morning are still in the future. God, that racket inside you is a … Read More
Ms. Pearl’s son turned on her Christmas lights so no one would know she’s not there— a row of electric candles in the window flicker blue, gold, blue again. Back bowed in her rain-soft front yard, as we … Read More