Cinematic Longings for Sophia in mother! and Blade Runner 2049

Last updated on: October 11, 2017 at 2:04 pm By Nick Olson

Two of our most compelling film directors working in the Hollywood studio system—Darren Aronofsky and Denis Villeneuve—recently released startling movies, and the movies have obvious differences. Aronofsky’s mother! is an original psychological horror film allegorizing in unorthodox ways the Biblical mythology. Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 is a science fiction sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 classic, with the same neo-noir tone. I’m struck by a common thread that binds each film’s disturbing vision of the future: the missing mother. These films... Read more

The Road to Dogmascus

Last updated on: October 11, 2017 at 12:32 pm By Tania Runyan

I’ve clearly missed some important cultural boat, for people love so many things that I just simply don’t get. Beer, Star Wars, zombies, body piercings. While my friends devote themselves to these phenomena with cultish fervor, I look on with confusion, if not a little disgust. But the item that used to top my list? (Allow me a moment to duck.) Dogs. (more…) Read more

Famous Last Words

Last updated on: October 6, 2017 at 11:21 am By A. G. Harmon

Towards the end of his life, Winston Churchill famously quipped: “I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.” As is always the case with humor, a world of seriousness is implied. For one thing, the statement rests upon an understanding of worth, or the lack thereof. It does not presume a consequence—i.e., there is no confident assurance of acceptance and glad welcome upon the meeting. There... Read more

To Be Born Again

Last updated on: October 10, 2017 at 9:29 am By Richard Chess

The day after Yom Kippur 5778 When I finish being born for the fourth time, I will live in a house by the sea. The windows facing the ocean will hold the ocean, as much as glass can hold. The phone will vibrate with messages of peace. There will still be a trashcan: everything that lives creates waste. This trashcan will be streaked with the oils of summer, the waste of dreams of vacationers who have been returned to... Read more

Poetry Friday: “A True Story”

Last updated on: October 9, 2017 at 9:15 am By Image

In the aftermath of three large hurricanes (Harvey, Irma, and Maria) the news has been filled with stories of communities recovering, trying to survive after the devastating impact of these incredible storms. Despite a lot of discouraging news, I have been moved by the reports of neighbors helping neighbors, strangers fishing each other out of flooded streets, the transcendental power of human decency. In the poem “A True Story,” Jennifer Maier uses eloquent, well-paced couplets to describe a man being... Read more

The Vocation Trap

Last updated on: September 29, 2017 at 2:39 pm By Bryan Bliss

My wife is finishing up the first of a multi-year graduate program in nursing. When she graduates, it will be with a doctor of nurse practice. (This will also, coincidentally, mark my retirement. Or so I keep telling her. She has yet to comment.) Anyway, her pursuing this degree has been a conversation we’ve had for close to fifteen years. But finances and children and accessibility to a program and then finances again have always pushed it. Maybe in a... Read more

Homecomings

Last updated on: September 29, 2017 at 2:35 pm By Elizabeth Duffy

Last night I sat on the curb with my three youngest children, while my three eldest walked in the homecoming parade. My paraders each represented a different sport in their team jerseys and class colors. They walked in leagues of friends, shoulder to proud shoulder, sharing the inside jokes of those in the social center, tossing out Smarties and Laffy Taffy to townie kids who scrambled and wrestled in unbecoming ways for the toss offs. My son, who is on... Read more

Richard Osler’s Hyaena Season

Last updated on: October 3, 2017 at 9:03 am By Peggy Rosenthal

We’ve all suffered wounds in some way. If not the physical wounds of war or other violence, then the psychic wounds of broken relationships. We struggle against the evil both within ourselves and outside in the world. Richard Osler’s new poetry collection, Hyaena Season, fearlessly probes all these wounds, all this evil. Let’s take the title poem in full, with its epigraph “For the Bushmen it [the hyaena] was the most clearly accredited representative of the power of darkness and... Read more

Bridal Veils and Blessing

Last updated on: September 29, 2017 at 2:23 pm By Caroline Langston

In the back of the closet right, where I’d stowed it years before, I found the wedding veil I’d rescued during the final ransacking of my mother’s house before it was put up for sale. The closet was musty and midsummer-hot, and the cloud of folded tulle spilled off the shelf like a meringue off a pie. I breathed in the heat—eyes closed, I might even have been back at my childhood home—and wondered if the veil was going to... Read more

Poetry Friday: “Underwhelmed”

Last updated on: September 28, 2017 at 12:36 pm By Image

Put on your hiking books and grab your compass, magnifying glass, and shovel: this poem is taking you on an exploratory adventure. What the poem is tracking down is the manifold concepts in the word “under.” Some of the poem’s “unders” are recognizable: like “under the splay-handed palms,“ “under the coral’s forest of horn,” “under God.” Others the poet has invented: “under the tender humidity,” “under the ticking aloe,” “under stillness.” There’s a playfulness to the many “unders” we meet... Read more