Goldbach’s conservative childhood was mine, and even if it’s not yours, it provides a lesson as to why large parts of the United States vote Republican and suggests how we might approach narrowing a widening chasm of philosophical differences.
Instead, he writes, “my beginning of trauma and violence led me on to a lifetime of creation rather than destruction.” What might our country look like in ten, fifteen, twenty years, if we all were so bold as to envision our present moment in such terms?
Photo by Joe Crowley The Mills The mills are on fire in Sanford, Maine. I’m three thousand miles away in Southern California, and I watch the clips on Facebook and local news websites. They’re saying arson, troubled boys who played with fire in the long-abandoned brick buildings. Flames devour disintegrated cardboard and century-old, oil-soaked innards […]
Frank pays affecting tribute to the lives of her mother and sister, both now gone, through the lens of place. And as the essay ends, she recalls visiting this same town years ago with her sister, before this present trip.
It’s lyrical, textured, natural, and unexpected. While the form these essays take are varied in content and style—some are thick and fibrous while others are delicate, unicolored strands that focus on one small aspect of grief—together they make for a rich, textured collection. And yet, from the very first essay, the reader has the foreboding sense that lives and hopes, like St. Germain’s yarns, can unravel at any moment.
Over the course of ten essays, Rember delivers a withering, if darkly humorous, diagnosis of a society on its last breaths: “We have become a depressingly aged and unfulfilled civilization. . . . Where once we were full of promise and lust for life, we are now sticking to the known and the comfortable. In financial terms, we’re living on interest rather than producing. In agricultural terms, we’re eating the seed corn. In ecological terms, we’re parasitic.”
If one remains open during the excavation process, it is possible to dredge up unexpected, sometimes unwelcome, truths and thus reveal how one’s past has been woven out of assumptions, the narratives of others, and a collective story told to cloak uncomfortable realities.
Photo by Best Picko Home In 1993, the British artist Rachel Whiteread was commissioned to create a sculpture similar to an earlier work, Ghost, which had involved casting an empty North London apartment in concrete and presenting its interior, solidified. The new sculpture would incorporate the same process, this time utilizing an entire house, the […]
The softness with which Renkl delivers the atrocities of life makes the joys of life shine that much brighter.
Central to the current crisis is a sense of instability and fragmentation inaugurated by mass mobility.