On this warm weekend we are favored with a cool breath of fresh air from the likes of Matthew Lippman, via Michael Klein’s review of Lippman’s poetry collection, American Chew. Poems like these are refreshing in their honesty and bewitching simplicity—Lippman’s, in particular, “start outside the body,” Klein writes, “but they almost always end up inside it—gnawing at the conscious.”
And Jennifer Nix emphasizes the sensory side of role model idolatry in the Sunday Essay. “Pressing On” introduces us to Nix’s childhood love of June Carter Cash, deftly weaving her appreciation of Carter’s music together with intimate memories of her father’s enduring struggle with kidney disease.
Where I Write #27 rounds out the weekend. For Billy Burgos, a serious spinal injury turned his daily routines upside down and helped him to identify a new place at which to write poetry—the city of Los Angeles itself. “Where I write is not as important now as the state of mind that I am writing in,” Burgos concludes.
