Fifteen Iraqi Poets

So we need poets to challenge received notions, tell us what we don’t know, ask the questions we can’t answer, and wake us up to both doom and Utopia. — Translator and essayist Eliot Weinberger…

Happy Every Day

I take both grace and insult With cheerful equanimity — Du Fu Dear Wendy, Congrats on your decision to move to China and, as Kerouac advised, be in love with your Shanghai life. I marvel…

“There’s Just a Meanness in This World”

On Charles Reznikoff, Testimony, v.2 The United States (1885-1915):  Recitative I can’t say I was tremendously impressed with this “broken-up prose” (wife Marie Syrkin’s label). Maybe it’s the dating—it’s way back in US history, and it’s hard…

The Buddha Smiles in Hell

A Reflection on Claude Anshin Thomas, At Hell’s Gate: A Soldier’s Journey from War to Peace. Shambhala Publications, 2004. In one of the most fascinating pieces I’ve read on the U.S. war in Iraq, the litany-esque,…