A Review of The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible, by Aviya Kushner (Spiegel & Grau, 2015). After two years in Jerusalem as a financial journalist and travel columnist during the second Intifada, Aviya Kushner returned to the United States in 2002 to enroll in the MFA . . .
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“Working for the railroad suited me. I was comfortable there; it was a supportive environment. I always liked my job. I began working for the railroad on April 1, 1982, and I decided to leave on April 2, 2007. Exactly twenty-five years. I decided to leave because, eventually, I couldn’t keep up . . .
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A Review of Donna Stonecipher’s Model City (Shearsman, 2015). How many poets are there in the world that you go looking for online, checking regularly, even impatiently, to see whether and when their new books will be out? Not many. Among the poets whose work I anxiously await, Donna Stonecipher has long been near the top of . . .
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(Remarks originally delivered as part of a panel celebrating the publication of Manisha Sinha’s The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, Yale University Press, 2016.) I was not surprised to hear UMass Provost Katherine Newman, in her opening remarks for this book launch, recall the days when historians told us that abolitionists were . . .
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When Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes presented The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du printemps) at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on May 29, 1913, an unsuspecting Belle Époque audience was shocked. The premiere of Sacre is the stuff of legend, with audiences hissing and screaming obscenities, and the dancers stunned and unable to hear Igor Stravinsky’s music, . . .
Read MoreIn 2015, more than one million refugees and migrants made the perilous trip to Europe via the Mediterranean Sea. In October alone, to beat the onset of winter and closing European borders, their number rose to nearly a quarter million, a record, and more than the total for all of 2014, as . . .
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The artist Anur Hadžiomerspahić has 5000 friends. He’d like to have more, but Facebook caps the number at five thousand. It’s a generous allowance, considering studies in evolutionary psychology have demonstrated that human beings, like our primate ancestors, can only maintain approximately 150 complex social connections at any given time. Facebook, of . . .
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The 2016 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize is Taije Silverman, for her poem, “Spiritual Evaluation,” published in Volume 56, Issue 2. Taije Silverman is the author of the collection Houses Are Fields, and her poems have been published Poetry, the Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, and AGNI. She received the 2010-11 W.K. Rose Fellowship from Vassar . . .
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Martìn Espada’s newest poetry collection entitled Vivas to Those Who Have Failed presents a series of poems that speak to hope and despair, of a world where bullets melt into bells, and of a future in which poets provide spiritual clarity. More concretely, the collection borrows from the elegy and ode, but never fully surrenders to either form, as . . .
Read MoreOnce upon a time, I came across the following scene: A small child wishes his grandmother happy birthday, and then says, “Cheer up, Grandma, most of it is done.” This comment inspired the title of my last book to be published in Italy: The Most and the Least. Most is a life counted out, . . .
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