Impeachment
Ukraine has a starring role in our news today, so it might seem beside the point to remember when it was not the subject of so much purported expertise, when its eastern cities were engulfed by a different sort of…
One Hundred Years of Self-Help: Two Book Reviews
As the title of Marian Crotty’s award-winning short story collection, What Counts as Love, suggests, what counts is not always the same as what’s hoped for, but may be exactly what’s expected, for in love’s pursuit, her characters go about…
Democracy Dies in Darkness: Two Book Reviews
The Eastern Shore by Ward Just The Great American Political Novel, from Henry Adam’s Democracy, to Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, from Toni Morrison's Beloved, to Ward Just’s Echo House, tangles with the notion of America as an…
Don’t Be Evil: A Review of Blume Lempel’s “Oedipus in Brooklyn”
“Abandon Yiddish.” The masters of the Enlightenment might as well have said abandon hope, for all the impact this particular prescription for a better life would have on its intended beneficiaries. Never mind that Yiddish had been their language for…
Fled Is That Music
The Truman Commission, which determined that everyday Americans deserved access to the same kind of education offered at Harvard and Yale, the kind of education, that is, that exposed them to the resources that allowed them to "live free," free…
The Hospitality Comes with an Upsell: “Murder at Jagged Rock,” a Translation of Sophocles’ “Women of Trachis,” by Keyne Cheshire
A great poet does not so much meet the demands of his or her time but, granted unerring insight, discovers them. Such insight can bestow an enormous isolation that he or she may, of course, disguise, or, like Sophocles’ Philoctetes,…
Out of Many, None
We in the Academy no longer require serious study of the humanities, much less of the arts, which reveals our outrage over President Trump’s proposal to eliminate their national endowments—not to mention our self-satisfied, self-righteous snickering a few months ago…
A Mid-Atlantic Light, A Meaning Suggested and Gone: Saundra Rose Maley’s “Disappearing Act”
Every time you try to make a meme—literary or historic or geographic—of the Mid-Atlantic, much less one in which the three align, you are upended by the power of some new discovery of person, place or past. The region’s countless…
Here We Are Now, Educate Us: Clear and Present Dangers in the Aftermath of an Election
It seemed that there was some kind of fallacy at work—likely of the logical, but perhaps, also, literary variety and of which textbooks in most disciplines warn students, lest they lose the argument or the patient or the poem—in the…
Burn While Reading: Ozone Journal by Peter Balakian, 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
That Henry Greenbaum spoke November 16th at the Germantown campus of Montgomery College recounting his experiences living in the ghetto, enduring death marches as well as slave labor in concentration camps after the loss of his mother and five of…