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 […]
FOR DONALD HALL, 1928-2018 Donald Hall died Saturday night, full of years and full of honors. He had been diagnosed with sinus cancer in May and declined treatment. He kept writing through his last weeks, if only for twenty minutes at a time. He lived his life through poetry, and although he stopped writing […]
This May I turned 70. I spend my time in three communities—the two in SW Florida and in Massachusetts not over-55 age-restricted, but in fact made up mostly of retirees. The third is in Maine, the state with the oldest median age in the nation. Since I don’t teach at UMB anymore, I rely on […]