The Big Cats, Part XI
On bones and bonfires
November bonfires roast / the marrow of the lost...
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Poetry to Vote By
Reading Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic on the eve of the election
How many of us are brave enough for art?
At the bakery down the block, polling shows Trump surging ahead. Each purchase of an election-themed cookie—Biden or Trump, with red, white, and blue sprinkles—is tallied by the bakers as a vote in favor for the relevant candidate. “Our forecast is never ...
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Elena Ferrante Returns to Naples
A new novel delights, but reveals decay
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The four novels in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan saga were a literary sensation when they appeared between 2011 and 2015. Now she’s back with a new novel in seven parts, The Lying Life of Adults, with a translation by Ann Goldstein. Though no less compelling than her blockbuster series, the smaller ...
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James Baldwin and the Fire This Time
Good trouble and the courage to hope
History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, but if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.
Maya Angelou, “On the Pulse of Morning” (1993)
As a guide, as a seer, as a prophet – James Baldwin is a writer we need. As Baldwin said about Beauford Delaney, the Black painter who rose to prominence in the ...
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How to Keep Your Soul Intact
A poetry series documents ten weeks under COVID-19
Over ten weeks spanning June, July, and August 2020, Val Vinokur composed a cycle of poems documenting life during the COVID-19 pandemic and published weekly at Public Seminar. Titled "The Big Cats,” the resulting series serves as a poetic diary, a kind of "Waste Land” with hyperlinks, responding to the ...
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The Big Cats, Part X
On melting ice, online shopping, and dads with leaf-blowers
Behind the thick blue smudge there is a wall / of feds in camouflage. ...
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Re-reading C. P. Snow
What the mid-century novelist and man of letters understood about being human in an uncertain world
Rather like the legendary couple of whom someone, struggling to understand their mutual attraction, cracked, “Well, they are both carbon-based life forms,” these books seem pretty disparate. But all of them help me find calm at night, particularly now, when the shadows gather and the future looks even darker than ...
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The Big Cats, Part IX
On the heat and halitosis of the State
This palpative uncommonwealth, a thing held / or pulled apart like a tightrope or meat off the bone....
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Fifteen Years
You haven’t tried.To know me.Only try to control me.You think it’s my job to cater to you?
I was seven,Or around that age,When you two finally separated.I was relieved.
You never deserved her.And she may not be thereAs much as I need her,But even then you haven’t earned her love.So why would ...
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The Big Cats, Part VIII
On the sharp edge of fragility
Follow your own feet uphill, fix / your gaze on the undeliverable missives / flying back to their return address...
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The Big Cats, Part VII
On the elements of crisis: oxygen, hydrogen, chlorine
The tigers sing: We never
ate your parents. So what
if we ate your parents.
They were no angels
and neither are you....
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The Big Cats, Part VI
On the rough, indifferent tongue of the truth
Come and see the tigers lick us with their rough / indifferent tongues as our wax darkens...
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