Many of Levertov’s poems are explicitly about her anti-American sentiments regarding the involvement of the United States in Vietnam. In “From a Plane,” the poet reflects on how Vietnam looks untouched if viewed from the air, “the great body / not torn apart, though raked …
Twenty-six women told their stories to Keith Walker about their experiences serving in Vietnam during the American involvement in that country. It is significant that each story is different and yet the same. Each woman tells the story of what prompted her to go to …
On March 21, 1967, ten thousand miles from home and a million miles from nowhere, an American gave his life to save the lives of his compatriots, jumping onto the back of an escaping prisoner, forcing him to the ground and covering the man’s body …
Although I am a self-confessed romantic, I’m no expert on love poetry. I haven’t read a book of so-called “love poems” in years. The last love poems I remember reading are Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (which I devoured), and a …
Visions of War, Dreams of Peace is a compilation of poems written by women intimately involved with the Vietnam War and the soldiers who fought it. The poets include mothers, daughters, wives, sweethearts, nurses, Red Cross workers, anti-war activists, journalists and entertainers, but the themes …
James Hall reviews Mark Doty's Sweet Machine, the author's latest collection of poetry, and is filled with an overwhelming urge to shop.
When Frank Lloyd Wright designed a house suspended over a water fall, he was fulfilling Montaigne’s belief that Our reason has capacity enough to provide the stuff for a hundred other worlds, and then to discover their principles and construction! It needs neither matter nor …
Mark Richard populates his latest collection of short stories, Charity, with a desperate set of characters that includes hospitalized orphans, ex cons, mythological figures like Death, and a scorched forest fire fighter. These characters are stripped by adversity, their own stupidity, and addiction, and charity …
Raymond Carver called her a precisionist. Others write that she is a minimalist and a miniaturist. As a student of her work I can only add illuminator and listener. Anything more would be too wordy a description for Amy Hempel. If you’ve never read any …
Although stylistically similar to Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy’s first novel, Suttree, brilliantly undermines the conventions of the Southern novel and the mythology of this tradition. Suttree is the story of an upper-middle class, college educated man who comes to Knoxville to live after being released from …