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Wednesday, February 10, 2021

'Love And Other Poems' Promises That Love Will Find Us, by Jeevika Verma, NPR

If hope were an object, it would be poet Alex Dimitrov's new book Love and Other Poems.

In its entirety, the book itself is one long love poem — to New York City, to the moon, to the many "scenes from our world" — but it's mostly about what it means to have hope, even when we feel like we're all alone.

Joan Didion’s ‘Let Me Tell You What I Mean’ Shows A Writer Ahead Of Her Time, by Charles Arrowsmith, Washington Post

The clarity of Didion’s vision and the precision with which she sets it down do indeed feel uncanny. Her writing has often revealed what was previously hidden, parsed what was unconscious, be it the miasmic unease of the late 1960s or the subterranean structures of national politics. Reading her now, she does seem prophetic, as manifested, for instance, in her concerns in 1968 about the weaknesses of the “traditional press,” whose unspoken attitudes and “quite factitious ‘objectivity’ ” come “between the page and the reader like so much marsh gas.” Perhaps those iconic sunglasses were really X-ray specs.

'Between Two Kingdoms' Tells A Story Of Survival — And Of A Journey To Learn To Live, by Heller McAlpin, NPR

Between Two Kingdoms, Jaouad's searching memoir of her illness and its aftermath, takes its title from an observation in Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor: "Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick." The line between them, Jaouad discovers, is more porous than most people realize.

White Oxen, by Louis Simpson

A man walks beside them
with a whip that he cracks.
The cart they draw is painted
with Saracens and Crusaders,
fierce eyes and ranks of spears.