Modern times have created soldiers in both the male and female variety. Both carry heavy guns. Both are involved in firefights. Both are wounded. Both are killed. But the female... Read More

Devout Nigerian Muslims use practitioners of spirit possession on the sly when faced with problems they cannot solve; in an ostensibly Catholic town in Mexico, the cult of the... Read More

“If you’re looking for some sharp-eyed observation and down-to-earth critique of the health care system, imperialism, the state of the environment, or corporate downsizing,... Read More

“How did a flower child who had faith that if you just trusted the decency in all people everything would work out become a middle-aged woman who can’t sleep, she’s so... Read More

It is not essential to have recordings of great poets reading their verse, but it certainly is wondrous. Only in the last 100 years have listeners been able to hear poets’... Read More

Recently, anyone who mentions the word “Bible” in a political context is assumed to be approaching an issue from the right … the religious right. This assessment is not... Read More

“The British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott began an autobiography that he never finished. The first paragraph simply says, ‘I died.’ In the fifth paragraph he writes,... Read More

“Over and over again have I had to send my own children, in spite of their tears and remonstrances, to bed, long after the assigned tasks had ceased to have any educational... Read More

Sometimes casting itself up among the clouds, sometimes caught in terse humidity, this long poem, a love song, rises and falls in “raw time.” With grace and clear vision,... Read More

“A middle-class teacher and her working-class student face each other in a large, drafty, grimy high school. The walls had been a bilious green once, before they acquired so... Read More

The issue of immigration in this country is, and has been for the past two centuries, a potential minefield for those trying to clarify the debate and suggest policy changes.... Read More

As runner-up for Poetry Society’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, this is a beautiful narrative poem about Annie Taylor, the intrepid woman who, for the first time, shot... Read More