Rajan Menon: A Covid-19 Hell on Earth
How This Country Fails Its Most Vulnerable: A Field Guide to Our Threadbare Social Safety Net.
Countee Cullen: Heritage
Africa? A book one thumbs
Listlessly, till slumber comes.
Unremembered are her bats
Circling through the night, her cats
Crouching in the river reeds
Abby Zimet: Rest In Poetry
We bid fond farewell to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, indefatigable poet, publisher, painter, pacifist, iconoclast, political activist, “heart of the Beat generation” and “legend of American letters, bookselling, rabble rousing, wild dreaming.”
Jose Padua: To the Ruling Class and All the Fearful Acolytes of Its Pale Supremacy
the sweetly subtle strength of a great
and rarely spoken language
Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, & Max Wilbert: Bright Green Lies
How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About it.
Dawn Potter| Song: The Famous Vision of America
an emptiness, too, in the bright
flicker of a cardinal on my back fence
Arlene Weiner: Nobody’s coming to save the children
Catherine Doty’s pitiless poems beautifully show us what we don’t want to see: children’s poverty, abuse, neglect. And their meanness. Poor children living in squalor, which Doty’s language often veils in lyrical glamor.
Matt Hohner: Where Are You Sending Your Poems This Week?
I’m sending my poems to reform school.
To prison. To the front lines. Straight to hell
on a one-way ticket.
Derrick Z. Jackson: 500,000 US COVID-19 Deaths and Counting | A Shameful Public Health Failure
The 1918 flu claimed an estimated 675,000 lives in the United States. With no drastic action, we will surely surpass the 1918 toll before returning to anything resembling normal life.
Kathleen O’Toole: On Grief, in a time of pandemic
What I’m learning about grief is that
it comes and goes, like the shadow in front of me
on the afternoon sidewalk.
Valerie Bacharach: Elegy for Nathan
An addict is an actor, able to look you in the eye, smile, and lie so convincingly that you begin to question yourself.
Video: Huntsville Station
Every weekday, dozens of inmates are released on parole from Huntsville State Penitentiary, the largest prison release center in Texas. With a bus ticket voucher and $100 release check, most of them spend their first minutes out of prison on phone calls, cigarettes, and quiet reflection at the Greyhound station up the block.
Video: Black Owned — Jackson
Introducing Black Owned, a film series exploring the Black entrepreneurial spirit and its essential contribution to the American economy through the perspectives of business owners.
Video: The Prisoner’s Song
Now if I had wings like an an-gel
O-ver these pri-son walls I would fly
And I’d fly to the arms of my poor dar-lin’
And there I’d be wil-ling to die
