Michael Simms: My Recent and Forthcoming Books
Vox Populi doesn’t usually include advertisements, but I hope you will indulge me when I let you know that my recently published books are available.
Helen Benedict: Unequal Mercy
Most of the countries embracing Ukrainians are simultaneously persecuting equally desperate refugees from elsewhere.
Baron Wormser: The Nightmare of Power
Over and over, I read and hear about power. The United States is a power, a great power, a super-power locked in ineluctable contests with other powers that pundits comment … Continue reading
Abby Zimet: Ukraine’s Battle of the Somme
Putin’s bloody debacle in Ukraine reflects a system “in which medievalism meets Stalinism meets dark farce.”
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: Erecting Stones
Here, in Congo Town, I’m picking up debris
from twenty years ago. Some remnants of bombs
and missile splinters, old pieces of shells from
the unknown past.
Lasse Söderberg: The dead children in the Tajo River
They have left the city
and their blind games
under the white bone of the sun
Wayne Karlin: The Lotus Eaters
And so he returned to Ithaca:
walked naked from the sea
and saw his shadow
fall on the white marble
Kelly Denton-Borhaug: The Intolerable Price You Pay
More than 17 of you veterans take your own lives every day. And you live with all of this, while so much of the rest of the nation fails to muster the will to see you, hear you, or face honestly the American addiction to war.
Valerie Bacharach: Night, Descending
Night explodes in fractures of shining glass.
Sidewalks hold storefront fragments,
deadly crystals glitter,
almost beautiful with still-red blood.
Rev. William J. Barber II, Karen Dolan: This is an Election Americans Cannot Afford to Lose
The stakes for America’s poor and low-income families are huge this election.
Richard Cambridge: In Medias Res
Tom, the eldest son of Daniel and Helen Brownson, tells his parents he has dropped out of college. He is now in the crosshairs of the draft board and will be re-classified 1-A — a good chance he will be sent to — and possibly die in Vietnam.
Yahya Frederickson: Duqq
I believe only the desert
can know the aridity
of cardamom, coffee, and ginger.
Christine Rhein: People used to ask
my father for advice — how to fix
a chimney crack,
a sagging porch, how to realign
a patio — bricks upheaved
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