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:
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.
For Savich, there is no difference between that which is learned in the world and the learning that can happen in a poem; the one aids the other and vice versa.
The philosophical attitude of existentialism so perfectly fits our time, you’d think it was invented for us.
In this timely book, Matthew Baigell examines cartoon images of Jews published in mainstream American magazines in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
My family didn’t move to these places, but their shapes, their possible breaths, bumped against my own history, my immediate future, parallel universes that might suddenly rope around my present, palpitating self.
Deep Salt Water is neither political nor didactic; rather, it is a text that transcends genre and uses the ocean and the life that exists within it as a lexicon for the necessary act of forgiveness.
We were going to visit Budapest for a vacation. “As long as we’re there, we could visit your grandmother’s village,” he said. “Maybe do a little research. You might find a family member who still lives there.”
Collectively, Auker’s essays and prose poems describe both the prying loose of norms that have structured her life and the emergence of a vibrant woman who seeks out wild places.
Reading this work gives the reader an uncanny sensation that Hall is not just presenting essays about the events of his life, but also mapping the typology of his soul.