• Poetry

    Embracing the Gods: “Each Moment a White Bull Steps Shining into the World”

    October 28, 2023 - By 

    Somehow or other I missed this poem all these years, despite its prominence in anthologies and wide acclaim for its author, Jane Hirshfield. “Each Moment a White Bull Steps Shining into the World” is a dramatic, “big” poem—big in ambition, imagery, and theme. Hirshfield is not content here to search for heaven in a wildflower or angel dust on a vase. Not that there’s anything wrong with such poetic devices, as Hirshfield herself would surely attest. But when her second line launches in on a “strange and frightening creature” that we know from the title is a “white bull,” we…

  • General Nonfiction - Personal Reflections

    Answering Alzheimer’s: Amy Bloom’s
    “In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss”

    October 22, 2023 - By 

    Amy Bloom gets right down to it in her 2022 memoir, “In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss.” The city of Zurich and the fact of her husband Brian’s Alzheimer’s disease comes up in the first paragraph as the couple boards a plane headed to that Swiss city. Their purpose for the trip is revealed in the fourth paragraph, which begins with these two stout declarative sentences: “Dignitas’s office is in Zurich, and that’s where we’re headed. Dignitas is a Swiss nonprofit organization offering accompanied suicide.” Through the subsequent 200+ pages, the multi-talented, much-honored Bloom (novels, short stories, non-fiction,…

  • Politics/Culture

    My Fever Dream of a Functional, Bi-Partisan Speaker of the House

    October 14, 2023 - By 

    Remember when Republicans stoutly and persistently referred to themselves as the party of law and order and personal decorum? Not for them the ragtag factionalism, irreverence and loosey-goosey relativism of the Democrats—the Republicans maintained discipline among their ranks and in their persons. God, family, country—and long live the United States! We’ll leave it to historians to determine the relative accuracy of the former Republican Party’s brand narrative, but there is one thing about which we can be certain: That Republican Party, assuming it ever existed at all, is no more. Perhaps it will find or reform itself in another election…

  • Music

    Brilliant Songs #41:
    Olivia Rodrigo’s “Drivers License”

    October 7, 2023 - By 

    Sometimes an artist comes along who just knocks the legs right out from under you, and after you’ve picked yourself up you’re left wondering how such seemingly natural, God-given talent could have developed to the degree it has. (Though one of the answers is surely “lots of hard work.”) This sense of amazement is all the more the case when the artist is a mere 20 years old, with a monster hit already in her rear view mirror and three Grammys on her shelf, still shining brightly after a debut album of all original material when she was 18 shot…