I try to avoid reading blurbs before I start reading a poetry collection. And I did that, successfully, with Seeing Things: Poems, the latest collection by Marjorie Maddox. This is a case of realizing I should have read the blurb first, to prepare for what I was about to read.
Maddox tells a story with the 61 poems she’s included in the collection. It’s not a narrative or told like a story. Rather, collectively the poems themselves present a story that is as hard to read as it is too gripping not to. It is a story of three generations of women, a story of depression, abuse, and dementia. If I gave the story a title, it might be “Broken Things, Mending.”
A statistic that even people familiar with the Bible find rather startling is that more than half of the Old Testament is poetry. The Psalms are the most obvious, but large parts of the major prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah and his Lamentations, and Ezekiel are written in poetic form as well. Even the New Testament has poetic sections, including the Sermon on the Mount of the Gospel of Matthew.
But it’s been my own experience – mostly in Protestant denominations but with a not-insignificant overlay of Catholicism – that poetry is rarely if ever mentioned within the church context. My own eyes were opened only a decade ago, when I took a weekend seminar with poet Scott Cairns at a writing retreat. That seminar not only introduced me to Cairns’ poetry but to that of Luci Shaw, Mark Jarman, Dana Gioia, and several others. A door in my mind was suddenly flung open.
Detective Chief Inspector Evan Warlow retired from the Welsh police force, and no one is quite sure why. His former boss knows, but none of the people Warlow worked with have a clue. He had years left to work, and he was excellent in his job. No one knows about the medical diagnosis he received.
He’s been spending his time on restoring his somewhat isolated stone house and walking his dog. He and his wife are long divorced, but he does stay in close contact with his sons. But even they don’t know about his condition (and don’t hold your breath if you think the reader is going to find out, either).
A landslide on a mountain path reveals the bodies of a man and a woman, and suddenly Warlow is very much in demand. This might be the seven-year-old case he never solved – what happened to an older couple who went hiking and disappeared? Autopsies confirm their identities; they also confirm that the two were murdered, most likely with numerous hammer blows. But how did get crammed into the side of a mountain reachable only with ropes?
Rhys Dylan
Warlow’s former boss convinces him to join the investigating team, and the case soon becomes a roller coaster of developments. And not the least chilling concerns the young couple who moved into the dead couple’s home; someone is watching then, just as someone watched the now-dead couple.
The Engine House is the first in 15 of the DCI Evan Warlow crime novels by Rhys Dylan, and it’s chock full of tension and suspense. It’s an absorbing story, and Dylan artfully uses the young couple to build the air of growing menace.
Dylan has published 14 novels in the DCI Evan Warlow series. A native Welshman educated in London, Dylan wrote numerous books for children and adults under various pen names across several genres. He began writing the DCI Warlow series in 2021; The Engine House was published in 2022. Dylan lives in Wales.
It’s easy to get angry and vengeful about the Bibas family, the mother and two children who were kidnapped on Oct. 7 and whose bodies were returned by returned by Hamas some 500 days later. The body said to be the mother turned out to be that of some unknown woman; the bodies of the two children showed they had been killed by hand and then mutilated to simulate death by an airstrike. Worse things happened to mothers and children on Oct. 7, but if we ever needed a reminder that Hamas and its supporters are psychopaths, it’s difficult to ignore the evidence now. Read Matti Friedman’s “The Family That Never Came Home” at the Free Press and Seth Mandel’s “The Meaning of Kfir Bibas.”
My 1970 AP Stylebook
For those of us who attended journalism school before the 2000s (long before), the “class bible” was the Associated Press Stylebook. We were required to memorize it in our first introductory journalism course; a style error on an assignment was an automatic F. (We could also keep it with us during assignments and tests.) I still have my copy, a small paperback pamphlet about one fourth of an inch thick. But over the years, AP made changes. The first one I really noticed was that pro-life groups could no longer be referred to as that but instead had to be called “anti-abortion groups.” The pace of change quickened after that. The subject of the Style Book has come up oddly enough because of the spat President Trump is having with AP over the “Gulf of America.” Marc Caputo at Axios notes that the spat is about far more than what to call the Gulf, because the Stylebook has become far more than news writing style.
Some 20 years ago, I had a project “forwarded for handling” (aka “dumped in my lap”) by the assistant to the company’s CEO – several letters from a middle school English class in San Francisco. A cover letter by the teacher explained this was a class assignment to protest something they believed the company was doing, and she was proudly joining their protest. It was my second direct experience with learning something had happened to the teaching of English; the first had occurred some years earlier when my oldest son was in sixth grade, and I discovered his English teacher couldn’t spell. The San Francisco letters, including the teacher’s, were filled with spelling errors, dangling participles, grammatical mistakes, and incomplete sentences. The response sent back was thanking her and the class for their concern, pointing out the company wasn’t doing what they thought. We included a red-marked correction of the teacher’s letter. I wish I had had Liza Libes’ post entitled “Why Did English Departments Abandon Ideas for Ideology?”
I’ve never read a poem quite like Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry by Ryan Ruby. I would expect that you haven’t either. Written in unrhymed pentameter, this is a poem about the history of poetry. It is also a poem about literary theory. It’s a poem that reads like what you might find in an academic journal on linguistics or communication technology. In other words, unless you’re familiar with literary theory and can translate academese, you’re going to find this poem a tough go.
I admit it: I found it a tough go. If I pretended anything else, I wouldn’t just be posing as an idiot. Remove the returns after each line, turning it into paragraphs, and you have an academic paper.
The speech Vice President J.D. Vance gave at the Munich Security Conference last week continues to reverberate. I don’t think I can recall a recent speech that has had as much reaction and response as this one, and it was on top of the one Vance gave at the Paris meeting on artificial intelligence. The Critic Magazine in the UK said Europe deserved it; The Spectator says it sent shockwaves across the continent. Matt Taibbi at Racket News looked at the reaction and said the mask has dropped.
We express gratitude for many things – recovery from an illness, a thankful child, the generosity of a friend, and a recognition at work, to mention only a few. But have you thought about being grateful for a jar of buttons on the dresser, the smell of toast, how to preserve lemons, the satisfaction of making a list, or an empty box?
These are a few of the things coursing through Gratitude Diary: Poems, the debut collection by Jessica Cohn. Structured within a 10-day cycle, the poems focus on unusual items for which one might be grateful, but some explain themselves. The objects are themselves symbols of something else, something fundamental in a person’s life.
A review of "Brookhaven" by Jody Collins on Substack:
"As you know, Miss Putnam, every story has a before, a during, and an after. I think it's how we make sense of the stories we hear, to organize them that way. Novels are like that, generally." Sam McClure (the elder) in "Brookhaven" by @Glynn Young. Historical fiction is my new favorite genre and Glynn Young's story, Brookhaven is the main reason why. I was a poor student of the Civil War when I was in school, so I learned a lot about particulars of a number of battles, as well as the effects of the war on the South. Young manages to weave a love story into a mystery surrounding a stealth-footed youth whose undercover intelligence (supposedly) aided Robert E. Lee and his army of Northern Virginia during the Civil War. This poet also enjoyed Young's addition of a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem at the head of each chapter, making Brookhaven both a time capsule of literature and a captivating, history book-worthy tale. (from my Amazon review). If you’re a historical fiction/love story fan, I highly recommend “Brookhaven.”
From 1968 to 2009, John Leax (1943-2024) was an English professor and poet-in-residence at Houghton College in New York. He was a poet, an essayist, and the author of one novel, Nightwatch. Leax’s poetry collections include “Reaching into Silence,” “The Task of Adam,” “Sonnets and Songs,” and “Country Labors.” His non-fiction writing and essay collections include “Grace Is Where I Live,” “In Season and Out,” “Standing Ground: A Personal Story of Faith and Environmentalism,” “120 Significant Things Men Should Know…but Never Ask About,” and “Out Walking: Reflections on Our Place in the Natural World.”
I’ve read Nightwatch, which is aimed at young adult audiences. It’s a coming-of-age story, focused on a boy named Mark Baker from his young childhood to his ten years. It’s a good story with an “edge” I haven’t usually seen in young adult books.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
Peter Biles, a fiction writer and essayist, discovered freedom in writing when he stopped worrying about “literary style” and instead focused on telling a story. He writes about it at Front Porch Republic: “Writing for the Common Good.”
Regardless of what you think about the new Administration, something extraordinary happened at the AI Summit in Paris: Vice President J.D. Vance gave a speech that the Europeans clearly disliked but needed to hear, and it is one fine speech. I watched it and I read the transcript, and it’s a speech like what used to be given when political leaders actually gave intelligent speeches. I didn’t know that, a year ago when Vance (then a first-term senator) spoke to largely the same group in Munich, he was essentially ignored and treated with disdain over a message their own peoples were telling them. Not this time. You can read the transcript of his Munich speech here.
Of all the news pouring out of Washington with “the Great Upheaval,” two items in particular caught my eye. The U.S. government has directly and indirectly been funding Hamas for years, including $2.1 billion since the terror group killed 1,200 people and kidnapped 250 hostages on Oct 7, 2023. The second concerns the Environmental Protection Agency, and the now-infamous “we’re dumping gold bars off the Titanic” caper, as one EPA staffer described it to an undercover journalist. The gold bars have been found, and the story and the antics involved are extraordinary even by Washington standards.
The stories about USAID, EPA, and the other targets of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are resonating in some pretty unexpected places, like with former officials of the Obama Administration. We are witnessing a sea change the like of which we haven’t seen in our lifetimes.
