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Properties of Light by Rebecca Goldstein

The Physics of Fiction, the Music of Philosophy: an Interview with Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s astonishments as a philosopher and as a novelist are too numerous to list here. Already launched in her career as a philosophy professor, she reached a moment in her own life when philosophical inquiry no longer felt like a broad enough arena in which to explore the full range of human experience….

Dear Dr. Poetry…

The Louisiana Purchase by Jim Goar Rose Metal Press, Nov. 2011 80 pages $15.95 Dear Dr. Poetry, I’ve been a middle school art teacher for twenty years, but thanks to budget cuts, I’ve recently had to begin teaching history, too. I’ve done my best to engage the students, assigning everything from presidential fusilli portraits and…

Photograph of a man and a woman having a conversation over a cup of coffee at a cafe

The Way We Talk

When I write, I often struggle with writing what falls within the quotation marks because I’ve been told conflicting things over the years about how to write dialogue. For most of my writing career, I tried to write dialogue the way my writing instructors taught me. An often-taught rule in beginning writing classes is: Listen…

Cover art for Deep Field by Philip Gross

Poetry Week: Deep Field

Deep Field Philip Gross Bloodaxe Books, November 2011 64 pages $21.95 Deep Field, by T. S. Eliot Prize-winner Philip Gross, charts the slow loss of the author’s father, John, to aphasia, an irreversible decline in the brain’s language faculties. Gross’s father, who once knew five languages, has lost his ability to complete even an English…

Cover art for The Other Poems by Paul Legault

Not Unlike…

The Other Poems Paul Legault Fence Books, November 2011 72 pages $15.95 Editor’s note: P. Scott Stanfield holds a Ph.D. in English and teaches literature at Nebraska Wesleyan University. Recently, I challenged him to see how many references to other works and artists he could make in a single 500-word review. He gets one point…