On January 14 George Kovach sent an email to his friends and colleagues announcing that he had been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer and had chosen to receive palliative care. I was shaken with grief—and disbelief. Wasn’t he putting the latest issue of Consequence to bed? Hadn’t I hugged George at Arrowsmith Press’s December […]
Welcome back to my blog, which has been on hiatus for over a year, and now has a name: So I Gave You Quartz. It’s from the first line of “The Hardness Scale,” and seems to be a good description of a blog post—not polished like a diamond, but not soft and crumbly like talc […]
The title of Nancy Mitchell’s third collection of poems tantalizes me with a number of possible readings. An out-of-body experience could mark the dissociation of ecstasy or trauma, or “the bodiless begun” of death. From any of these states, a “shop” offers repair. How these meanings intersect, and how they define the writer’s journey through […]
The title of Charlotte Seley’s book comes from a sentence by Roland Barthes, “The world is in fact just that: an obligation to share. The world (the worldly) is my rival.” This can be read as a brag or an admission of defeat—who can compete with multitudes? Either way, it’s a claim for […]
Reading notices of Michelle Obama’s Becoming made me remember meeting the First Lady during a campaign fundraiser in Massachusetts the summer of 2012. Here’s an update of some notes I wrote immediately after the event. You can see in the photo that I look a little like a deer in the proverbial headlights. That’s how […]
I don’t usually write about prose, but Sweet Marjoram is an exception. In part, it’s because DeWitt Henry is a dear friend whose work I’ve read for decades. It’s also because so much of this book of lyric essays is inspired by, or works like, poetry. Shakespeare is Henry’s presiding muse, from title to end-note—best […]
This month brought the death of two enduring figures in Boston’s literary landscape–first Bill Corbett and now Sam Cornish. I don’t remember when Sam and I first met—possibly at Book Affair in 1980, where I was promoting Green House or Alice James Books. When Sam was literature director of the Massachusetts Council on Arts and […]
In case you haven’t read Anders Carlson-Wee’s poem and the editors’ apology at the center of debate that led to Grace Schulman’s op-ed in the New York Times, here’s a link. In his dramatic monologue, the poet uses the persona of a homeless man giving advice to someone begging on the streets. The dialect suggests […]
If the title of Sam Cha’s new book echoes Donald Trump’s inaugural address, it reveals the murderous heart of a nation in the way actual photos of the event show the emptiness of Trump’s imagined spectacle. American Carnage uses a dramatic, multi-genre, intertextual structure to investigate histories that shape what it means to be American […]