Nezhukumatathil is proudly and profoundly staking her claim and making room for her concerns in the tradition of American nature writing, a tradition that has often felt confined and limited by its whiteness.
Hohn’s careful explorations of the subjects presented to him by his new place also become markers along his own process of the intellectual and personal discovery of his psychological inner coast.
Attempts at Understanding: A Review of The Inner Coast: Essays by Donovan Hohn Read More »
Brant has travelled all around the Great Lakes basin, interviewing fishermen and scientists. He clearly honors these people and the work they have done. Their pictures and their stories are scattered throughout the book.
Steinorth loves where words come from and how they sound against one another. She loves how they carry meaning and how meaning can overwhelm them. She delights in the history and connotations of the words she uses.
Perhaps it was that sense of loss that sent her out searching for different kinds of beech trees, that sent her rooting around in the old books collecting lore and the attempts at early science, that forced her to learn everything she could about these trees.
Why our continuing attraction to Greece? There is something in that small country out there on the edge of Europe that doesn’t feel like the rest of the continent. Part of the attraction is certainly to the very different modern history, and to a landscape shaped by human use yet still oddly wild.
Returning to Greece Read More »
Although there are hints of trouble in my grandmother’s book, I had never seen them. I was glad to own it, but I was overwhelmed by the tedium of her attempt to accent the rosy endurance of this immigrant family she had married into. My grandmother’s truth was the one that forgot or erased pain and remembered only joy.
“At Springhill Farm,” by Keith Taylor Read More »
I feel grateful to Northern Illinois University Press for publishing Something That Feels Like Truth by Donald Lystra. It is a book that deserves an audience, even in a time when we are uncertain who might comprise an audience for well written, passionate fiction.
Ahem, dear National Book Foundation… Read More »
As for poetry criticism, I am reading a critical book on Jean Follain, but in English the book I’m looking forward to the most is The Embattled Lyric: Essays and Conversations in Poetics and Anthropology by Nathaniel Tarn.
One More Summer (Make that Fall) Reading List Read More »
We have all participated in the discussion about the new ways of reading, the end of the book, the new literacy, etc., etc., ad infinitum. And things are certainly changing.
