Category: Literature
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Honoring Stories, Honoring Our Humanity: Thinking About Close Reading
Oh, dreaded high school English class. Where Mrs. ——— beats social truths out of poems and stories, and clenches the narratives in her fists to wring out all meaning. We are a species driven to find it. We poke lines of poems until their bruised, we prod paragraphs until their quaking, drenched in sweat, and Read more
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Brave Enough to Admit We’re Lost: Finding Self to Find Community
In early 2025 I had the privilege of hearing Clint Bowman read from his new book of poems, If Lost, at Poetry Hickory, a monthly poetry reading with featured poet followed by an open mic. Bowman explained he organized his book as a sort of guide for someone lost, with three sections that act as Read more
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Earthed by Light: Response to Sylee Gore’s chapbook Maximum Summer
Despite the heat in Sylee Gore’s chapbook of poems Maximum Summer, the book holds a cold dark, the baby being fitted with clothes knitted while the speaker is on commute, always the breeze pushes leaves of the sycamore, blue light is a cool light, and the images in her poems only expose flashes of life Read more
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Have You Hugged Your Poem Today? (Who Are We Writing For?)
John O’Donohue says in Eternal Echoes: “Analysis is always subsequent to and parasitic on creativity. Our culture is becoming crowded with analysts and much of what passes for creativity is merely clever know-how” (p. 186). When I originally wrote this quote down in my journal, I was spending time thinking about the value of understanding Read more
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From Johnson to Leopold: Dull Certainty to Humble Wonder
This semester my writing students and I have been exploring in a class I’ve called “Representations of Nature.” Part of our task has been to study how writers past and present have represented their relationship with or cultural perspective of nature via essays, poetry, almanacs, and fiction. Along the way we have our own weekly Read more
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We Still Read (Medieval Poetry): Gawain’s Failure as Success
Last year I assigned my college composition class to read the medieval Romance poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (“GGK”). I had spent time studying it over the past year, and, with the help of the book Approaches to Teaching Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I couched the reading of it within the Read more
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Night Locks the Birds in the Sky: Review of Bird Ornaments
How many ways can we come to know the body through metaphor? In Angel T. Dionne’s book of poems Bird Ornaments, it can be and become so many things: a “dimensional graph/of genetic variations,” string beans for arms, caterpillars for eyebrows, teeth become adversaries. And usually when we think of metaphors, we imagine them opening Read more
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Let’s Behead Ourselves: Living As Symbols, Not Images
As I spend time thinking about language and its imperfections, how it only reveals slivers of truths, not a whole truth, I discover how easily we deceive ourselves into believing we could possibly ever know something wholly. Take self-identity for an example. We define ourselves by our jobs, at least in the U.S., in such Read more
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Wisdom from Riddles
Bard by Morgan Llewelyn has a great passage about a society too focused on the material world: The speaker describes two roads to take: “One would develop the forces locked within our minds; the other direction led to the constant refinement of tools and weapons, increasing reliance on matter rather than spirit. In choose the Read more
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Bent Wings: The Season of Coming and Going with Tarot: Day 17
Tarot card of the day: Four of Wands I love how Tarot images open the reader to so many different possibilities, sometimes too many. When I pulled the Four of Wands, upright, my first response was: this is not how I feel today (although I will say every day I pull a card for this Read more