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…The “Concerning Craft” series introduces Little Patuxent Review contributors, showcases their work and draws back the curtain to reveal a little of what went into producing it. “Middleman is at once a supremely painterly painter and a writerly painter,” art critic David Cohen has written. “His illustrious, fecund career provides a service to aesthetics by dispelling the […]
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