My grandmother’s glass cabin, perched high in the Sandia Mountain Range of New Mexico, is a place I would visit each summer of my childhood without fail. This is my first time back since I left home for college, and with it, left childhood. Everything seems, although familiar, smaller as well–the drive up the mountain …
“There are keener griefs than God. / They come quietly, and in plain daylight, / Leaving us with nothing, and the means to feel it.” -Christian Wiman, “This Mind of Dying” Though this year’s edition of Poetry International is packed with poetic delights, the portfolio section on Christian Wiman knocked me out. Though the name …
When I created the “Fatherhood” category on my website nearly five years ago, I knew that becoming a dad marked a rite of passage. It never occurred to me that our son James might only live three days, or how having and losing him in such short succession would change me. No man accurately anticipates …
Val and I leave tonight for Sydney, Australia to visit her sister, sister’s husband, and our new baby nephew. As a friend and fellow bereaved father pointed out, there is more to this adventure than just a holiday down under. Though I have held one very special little girl since the passing of our son, …
In his most recent collection, Next to Nothing, Chris Agee fuses voracious verbal intelligence with well-tuned musicality. But this is not why I am compelled to re-read this book. Written in the years following the death of his four-year-old daughter, Agee’s elegies ring with veracity, transcending reportage of paternal grief even as it details, in …
“You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.” -Alexander Nikonov I have Kit Stolz to thank for turning me on to Vera Pavlova. I devoured her first collection in English, aptly titled If There is Something to Desire. Keen, startling, and erotic–poems of …
