Philip Terman: Too Much Already
Among the ruins, Nasser, dark in the shadows, hands gesturing in all directions. He speaks in a measured Arabic to the backdrop of rifles and bombs.
Mike Vargo: System Failure, from the Bronze Age to the Age of Trump
Did a long-ago collapse of civilizations portend our future?
Sydney Lea: Hush
Does it make any sense to say I heard dead silence? No matter. I’ll simply declare that I’ve never known such quiet in the sixty years I’ve roamed these woods and hills.
Hildegard von Bingen: Vision 7, The Devil
Then I saw a burning light, as large and as high as a mountain, divided at its summit as if into many tongues.
Abe Louise Young: Calling from the Homeless Camp
On Tenderness, Expulsion and Mutual Aid
Desne A. Crossley: Rolling in the Aisle
In Nashville in 1950, my mother boarded a city bus. She didn’t go to the back. She didn’t act like her place was the outermost fringe of a world ruled by whites.
Baron Wormser: The Missing Poet
Reasons abound for Republicans to not think twice or to dismiss poetry as elitist or more identity politics or whatever pejorative comes to mind. Much more important work is waiting– or so we are told.
Sara Hegy: Even the Longest Winters End
Winter in a Refugee Camp, Gaza
Paul Christensen: A Diary of Winter
The cold came in silent as an owl. The fences stared out at the clenched landscape with gaping eyes, unlocked gates, a path already flattened out in anticipation of the coming snow.
Ramzy Baroud: ‘We Lost Everything, But We Are Still Standing’ | Letters from Gaza
None of those who communicated with me throughout the war have ever questioned their faith, and have often, if not always, begun their messages by checking on me, and my children.
Alexis Rhone Fancher: Stages of Grief
17 years since my son’s death, and still, each night when my husband drifts off, I watch movies, write, or read. Anything to stay awake.
Adam Patric Miller: Next Year’s Words
I scroll down and am stunned to see a large ad sponsored by The Jewish Agency for Israel featuring a former student who is going to share his “powerful story of strength, sacrifice, and service” fighting as “a lone soldier” for the IDF.
Vox Populi: The Most Popular Posts of 2024
Thank you so much for helping to make Vox Populi a success in 2024. Since our founding 10 years ago as a newsletter for anti-fracking activists in Western Pennsylvania, we’ve accumulated more than 5,000,000 visits. We now have over 20,000 daily subscribers, about 35% outside the United States.
Mike Vargo: Magical Realism — in Literature, in Life, and Online
My daughter called herself Dark White Wolf, and when I was a child, I had an imaginary companion — a second self — whom I brought to the dinner table with me. Nobody was allowed to sit in my doppelgänger’s chair.
