When I find myself unaccountably crying as I reach the end of a collection of poems, when the combined weight of the poet’s felt human presence and the loss seeping through the poems brings tears, I know something powerful is about. This happened as I read one of the last poems,“The Last Out,” in Dan Gutstein’s Bloodcoal […]
Read More…Jo Kellum is one of the most audacious people I know. Not in terms of the look-at-me audacity of celebrity culture, where luminaries wear meat dresses or overturn tables on TV to grab attention. Kellum is quietly and unapologetically herself. Our friendship itself is audacious. Jo is a gay woman in her late 70s, a […]
Read More…Depending on the shine of light or the turn of a page, author Edith Pearlman shifts from the point of view of a lost six-year-old girl to an addict of a drug made from a Brazilian beetle. From a fed-up cancer patient to a pair of shop-lifting geezers to a Jewish student of Japanese. She’s a […]
Read More…Audacity and I had a test of wills a few weeks ago. On a whim, I’d signed up my teenaged son, my brother–eight years my junior–and myself for a mud run. We had eight weeks to train for the run, my first 5K, but there was no way to prepare for the obstacles: walls, nets, […]
Read More…Writers agonize over the every word, then painstakingly revise and edit. And visual artists tend to communicate best at the preverbal level. So the prospect of having to spew spontaneous utterances at the behest of a stranger can be unnerving. While some grin and bear it, others find a better way to bare their souls: fabricating […]
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Little Patuxent Review 