Reviews

The son of a preacher takes to the center of the makeshift stage at a juke joint, hastily converted from an abandoned cotton mill to a place of revelry. He […]

A book can be well-reviewed and judiciously praised yet still be underappreciated. Reviews must concentrate on telling what happens and why that seems to matter. Critical essays can take on […]

It is a strange thing to visit a museum these days—especially in Washington, D.C. I have restlessly visited galleries in this town for almost twenty years; in fact, I moved […]

Ecological poetry is at its most potent not when it explicates its cultural or historical milieu, but when it stages its own inability to do so. Or at least this […]

The first time I saw fireflies, I squinted to make sure I wasn’t imagining things. They twinkled in a tree outside my friend’s home in Princeton, New Jersey, flashing on […]

We live in an age suspicious of beauty. And why not? Aesthetic matters can feel like distractions and luxuries in light of the more pressing concerns of morality and social […]

He who saves a nation violates no law. —Donald J. Trump, plagiarizing the character        Napoleon, in Rod Steiger’s Waterloo (1970)   They boast that America is the […]

For the past few years, I have been engaged in an intense argument with myself. This argument reached a climax last May, a few moments after I saw the film […]

Today’s classrooms are battlegrounds for political and cultural conflicts. Are teachers prepared to serve on the front lines? Despite being set at a school, Lau Yee-Wa’s debut novel Tongueless provides […]

Joyelle McSweeney’s Death Styles does what poems ought to do—attempt to give us experience, the derivative of event, the lines that represent acceleration in describing the actual speedometer markings. It’s […]

One does not need to understand the world to artistically express it. In fact, it seems that often the latter occurs in the terrifying moments when the former is revealed […]

When my children were toddlers, they enjoyed a lift-the-flap book by author and illustrator Karen Katz called Where Is Baby’s Mommy? I found the title both amusing and alarming. Why […]