Books
Ron Padgett’s “Pink Dust” proves that W.H. Auden was wrong — the nothing of poetry contains everything required to make a good (even heroic) life happen.
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Larry Robin is to Philadelphia what Allen Ginsberg is to Paterson, New Jersey. In short, he is beloved, far and wide.
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Two astonishing books about the lives of Polish Jews who survived the Second World War or were born after the war.
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Timelines bounce a bit through the loosely organized, vignette-rooted book, where the back half casually weaves through a checklist of characters and tales not to be missed.
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Jackson Lears’s collection of essays and book reviews gets a few things right in its description of various kooks, oddballs, and mavericks who sometimes succeeded in moving history in their direction. But it gets far more wrong.
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“Fable for the End of the World” reflects our own uncertain condition — there are possibilities unknown, alternatives that even would-be godlings like Elon Musk and his ilk have not accounted for.
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In “Justice Abandoned”, Rachel Elise Barkow argues that much of the blame for the blight of American mass incarceration lies with the Supreme Court.
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For poet Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr., the neurological is also archeological.
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Minor White’s autobiographical undertaking lacks diaristic narrative. There’s too much neurotic navel-gazing too much of the time. Yet it is very appealing as a twisted personal miscellany whose contents range from summaries of sex dreams to snarky letters that were never sent.
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Arts Remembrance: Tom Robbins’s “Joy in Spite of Everything”
In his writing, in his life, and in his fun, generous, and winsomely wise spirit, the late — but never late for a party — Tom Robbins chose to feel “ridiculously fine” and wanted us to feel the same way.
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