Although the play ends with the birth of Elizabeth I, the hope for the future that she might provide rings hollow in light of the fact that those celebrating her birth are also doomed. Thomas Cranmer, whose encomium to the infant closes the play, will be executed before he sees her reign, as will her mother, Anne Boleyn. The play concludes less with the promise of a better future than by underscoring the fact that the one thing that is sure about the future is that none of us will get to see most of it.
During the last few weeks of online teaching under quarantine, I have felt some of the strongest moments of solidarity with students that I have experienced as a teacher — a feeling arising from the fact that we have all had to recalibrate how we understand the narrative arc of our lives. We had been operating under the assumption (even if we knew better, in theory) that we moved through a predictable and coherent trajectory, and now we have been forced to confront the fact that meaningful, human-centered plot structures do not govern our lives.
I had only been living in New York for a few months in 2014 when I came across Roya Marsh’s work for the first time. A friend of mine dragged me to a poetry slam on the Lower East Side and as poet after poet took to the stage, my attention was stuck on a small chalkboard wall in the corner. On it was a small portion of Marsh’s poem, Admissions of Guilt: “I am guilty of not fixing the things I have broken starting with myself.” I was immediately hooked.
I spent the next several months working to track down the obscure poet and, hopefully, get a copy of the poem in its entirety. Finally, Marsh and I connected in 2016, and I’ve been following her work ever since. Little did I know that this pursuit of a single poem would launch me into the city’s vibrant queer poetry scene — a cultural melting pot in which queer poets indict white supremacy and promote a wider understanding of the full spectrum of sexuality and gender.
The remote Siberian town of Verkhoyansk, three thousand miles east of Moscow and six miles north of the Arctic Circle, has long held the record, with another Siberian town, for the coldest inhabited place in the world. The record was set in 1892, when the temperature dropped to ninety below zero Fahrenheit, although these days winter temperatures are noticeably milder, hovering around fifty below. Last Saturday, Verkhoyansk claimed a new record: the hottest temperature ever recorded in the Arctic, with an observation of 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit—the same temperature was recorded that day in Las Vegas. Miami has only hit a hundred degrees once since 1896. “This has been an unusually hot spring in Siberia,” Randy Cerveny, the World Meteorological Organization’s rapporteur of weather and climate extremes, said. “The coinciding lack of underlying snow in the region, combined with over-all global temperature increases, undoubtedly helped play a critical role in causing this extreme.” Siberia, in other words, is in the midst of an astonishing and historic heat wave.
Although there is pleasure in the comic’s depiction of the predictable cycle of Wendy’s highs and lows, this is not all that Scott’s work offers. In “Wendy,” as well as in its sequel “Wendy’s Revenge,” from 2016, and, now, in “Wendy, Master of Art,” the third installment of his protagonist’s misadventures, which came out this month, Scott goes beyond caricature, allowing Wendy and the characters surrounding her to become fully formed. Scott manages a rare thing: the sharpness of his satire doesn’t preclude a realistic rendering of personhood, and the seeming flatness opens up, at every turn, to a depth of feeling.
My mother’s mother, toughened by the farm,
hardened by infants’ burials, used a knife
and swung an axe as if her woman’s arm