Appendices Pulled from a Study on Light
The poems and prose in Appendices Pulled from a Study on Light thus delve into Babbitt’s passion for illuminated manuscripts, his confessed object of reverence.
On Worry
Then, on October 8, a bubble cone began to rise from the earth at one corner of the village. Cracks appeared in fields. The resident administrator to the United Kingdom watched as a cluster of grazing sheep fell into the earth, and, a minute later, the earth seamed itself together, eating the sheep. This, he believed, was the start of a new volcano. He radioed the Royal Navy for help, and a ship set off from Cape Town to help evacuate the islanders. That night, residents camped in tents, as far from the volcanic activity as they could go on the small island. The air was wet with drizzle.
Why Indigenous Literatures Matter
Even within the Indigenous community, identity is a contentious topic, with reasons rooted in a history of attempted erasure. And yet, Indigenous literature is in itself a political act of resistance to those efforts.
This Business of Words: Reassessing Anne Sexton
The scale by which Sexton extends the territory she covers as a poet, practicing her art while always having a firm eye upon appealing to as massive an audience as possible, call to mind the pop-synthesis self-marketing of later musical figures such as Madonna and Lady Gaga (Sexton herself also had her own band, Her Kind).
Caesura: Essays
This is a book that wrestles with the expansive ideas of life and death as much as it chronicles the multitude of quotidian details we regularly encounter.
Rants from the Hill
Rants from the Hill, Michael P. Branch’s collection of humorous, sly essays is easy to underestimate.
Ode to Orange
Photo by theilr Tonight, with the rain, the streetlight has turned my bedroom window bright orange, translucent—that kind of toxic phosphorescence found in creeks near strip mines—and of course it makes me think of Kenova, westernmost West Virginia, the bright orange banks of the Big Sandy and the Ohio, lit up with Ashland Oil and […]
Silent Impacts
I am keenly aware that I look suspicious—a woman wearing a Tyvek moonsuit and waders, juggling a stack of steel posts, fuchsia survey tape, and a rubber mallet. Pickup truck drivers give me you’re-not-from-around-here looks; so do occasional leisure boaters, who I hope to Jesus are not eating any fish from this river. The Bainbrydge River is sluggish, a sulfury, over-hard-boiled-egg green. My steel gauges suck right down into its bottom.
Searching for the Duck Hole
My mother started calling me about a year and a half ago. She is in her late eighties and suffers from cognitive decline, so she does not remember that we haven’t had a relationship for more than twenty-five years. Despite her memory struggles, she figured out my home number and leaves messages on it. The first one, transcribed to include her pauses, looks like poetry:
Transparent
After my daughter’s birth in 2002, there were nights I sat in the rocking chair next to her crib, understanding that the world would be better if I killed myself. And her. I’d grip the arms of the chair and flex every muscle in my body to stop myself. One night, I walked into the room where her father was reading and sat on the edge of the bed beside him. I admitted I had no feelings—for him, for her, for myself—but that we could be friends; we could raise her together. We’d be fine. Our lives would be fine.