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When reading Sublime Physick, the yin-yang symbol comes to mind, as Madden cites academic thinkers and essayists from generations past, alongside contemporary popular icons, usually of the musical variety, specifically his personal favorites like John Lennon and Geddy Lee.
I live near a cemetery in the Berkeley hills that has turned green from the rain. I do most of my jogging in the cemetery, and it reminds me—especially going uphill—that our time here is fleeting. I run among the dead, and I run among the deer and turkeys and other animals forced down the…
In Seamus Heaney’s acclaimed translation of Beowulf, the narrator describes Grendel and his mother’s fearsome raids, declaring that no one is safe “where these Reavers from Hell roam on their errands.” This was by far the most high-profile usage of the word “reaver,” an otherwise obscure and obsolete term for a plunderer; that is, until Joss…
Years from now, the uncertainty and accompanying anxiety many of us have about the current political season may be displaced by different, more complicated emotions. Such perspective is cold comfort to the millions who are fearful of a possible Donald Trump presidency. For four years we have known that 2016 would usher in a new…
Every year, the VIDA Count reminds us just how far women have to go in order to achieve gender parity in the publishing world. This Women’s History Month, let’s reflect on twenty-six centuries of firsts from women writers. From Ancient Greece to the Baltimore Uprising, these eight women fought to be heard in societies…
Livre Paris, France’s annual largest book fair, took place last weekend, and the invited country this year was South Korea, in honor of the France-Korea Year, celebrating 130 years of cooperation between the two countries. Interest in Korean culture has grown exponentially over the last few years. Lack of strategic marketing and distribution networks, cultural…
The autobiography of the imagination writes itself, one could say. It writes every time we write, every time we dream or daydream. It is its own captain’s log, the transaction and receipt. It reveals the self to make the self into a stranger, twisting the I to wring out a you. With every persona poem…
Lee Hope, in her richly imagined and ambitious novel, Horsefever, explores a similar dynamic both between rider and horse and between women and men, but she goes beyond Lawrence to explore riding as a metaphor for the challenge and art of story-telling. Her story-in-progress itself becomes the author’s mount, as it were, a mount with a will and spirit of its own.
The games children play can tell us a lot about ourselves as human beings, regardless of whether we attribute the inspiration behind them more to nature or nurture. In “Fiddlebacks” (New South), Kimberly King Parsons makes good use of the games played by three siblings, exploring what they reveal about the hidden fears and desires…
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