Essay: We like doing good…and that’s hopeful
The guy sitting in the window booth of the bagel shop, surrounded by six or eight odd-size bags and packages, could have been an aging hipster. It was that sort [...]
Essay: “The Odyssey” – three translations side by side
In preparing my review of Daniel Mendelsohn’s new translation of The Odyssey, I made a detailed comparison of how it matched against Emily Wilson’s 2018 version and the 1967 rendering [...]
Poem: Confesses
Confesses Patrick T. Reardon Clark Street this flat morning is a god of hardness, white in sun. One-Cent watches the Tower of Silence pull her homeless luggage north, [...]
Book review: “Like Love” by Ed McBain
At the end of Ed McBain’s 1962 novel Like Love, Steve Carella and Cotton Hawes watch as the confessed killer is taken out of the squadroom on his way to [...]
Book review: “Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ‘Letters and Papers from Prison’: A Biography” by Martin E. Marty
In a book filled with the debates and arguments of theologians, Marty E. Marty gives the final words to two people who knew Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the last days of [...]
Poem: Deep
Deep Patrick T. Reardon One-Cent runs like two thousand pigs into the deep. He is where the wind starts. Later, he will be buried facedown. The beaver trap snaps. [...]
Book review: “The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend” by Glenn Frankel
The two searchers in John Ford’s classic Western The Searchers — Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) and Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter) — come upon a smoldering Indian village and the bodies [...]
Book review: “The Waters” by Bonnie Jo Campbell
Picture this: Six goofily regular guys in the middle of the night are stumbling neck-deep in a turbid bog, called the Waters, in a stumblebum effort to carry Rose Thorn [...]
Poem: Voice
Voice Patrick T. Reardon . Hear my voice. Hide me. He underwent translation, like a poem set afire, like a slashed Madonna and Child. Sword tongue and bitter salad. River [...]
Book review: “How Architecture Works: A Humanist’s Toolkit” by Witold Rybczynski
The subtitle of a book can be distracting, enlightening and, at times, misleading. My sense — for what it’s worth — is that the author may come up with the [...]