William Carlos Williams, Poet of Suburbia
When I came in for a chicken pox shot, my mother mentioned to Dr. William Eric Williams that she could recite one of his father’s poems from memory. “Let’s hear it,” he said.
The End of Things
Popular opinion says that during the holiday season, people either fall in love or reflect on their past year of life. Sometimes they do both, but it’s hard to manage these conflicting actions at the same time. One is active, expressive, and outward moving. The other is passive, observational,
On Reading Less
A part of me believed that the amount of books I read revealed whether I had a good year, whether I’d done more than I expected or had failed to keep up.
The Possibilities of Brooklyn Past
Rarely do an adaptation and its source material mesh so well as they do in Brooklyn—the 2009 novel by former Ploughshares guest editor Colm Tóibín, and the 2015 film by John Crowley.
Round-Up: Word of the Year, June Eric-Udorie, and Best of 2016 Lists
From the the word of the year to an anthology on feminism, here's the latest literary news.
Science Fiction for the New Year (and the New Administration)
Classics such as George Orwell’s 1984 with its now-ubiquitous “Big Brother,” Ray Bradbury’s censorship critique Fahrenheit 451, and Margaret Atwood’s terrifyingly gender-regressive Handmaid’s Tale depict societies strangled by the evil clutches of the government and the populace’s inability to identify and challenge their own manipulation.
Aloud Poetry
For so long, I’ve heard academic poets and readers disparage poems written to be spoken aloud, condemning them as less thoughtful, as noisy and navel-gazey, their craft less delicate and considered.
“Post-Truth” is the Anti-Poetry of Our Time: Why I’m Reading Carmen Tafolla ahead of 2017
The humanity of Carmen Tafolla’s poetry collection, Salsa and Sonnets (Wings Press) brings me back to the year I was living in Mexico City when in 2014, forty-three Ayotzinapa students were disappeared and presumably killed.
The Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation
The Hurston/Wright Foundation was founded in 1990 in Washington, D.C. by award-winning author Marita Golden and bibliophile/cultural historian Clyde McElvene.
Review: SWING TIME by Zadie Smith
In a novel about history, about generations, reading Swing Time is like suddenly remembering a song you used to love.