Rachel Hadas: Pastorals
Its title is Red Comet, but the book itself is more like a long freight train, a slow train, a train crammed with information, a train that stops at every station, not to let anyone out but to take more in.
Michael Simms: All Time Most Popular Posts in Vox Populi (2014-2025)
Vox Populi was founded on April 1, 2014 when Nisha Gupta and I met for coffee and decided to start a website to support the anti-fracking activists in Western Pennsylvania.
Video: A Swim Lesson
An ode to an everyday hero: Bill Marsh, a swim teacher who helps children manage their fears and discover their own power when submerged in an overwhelming unknown.
Video: The commencement address that Harvard suppressed for mentioning genocide
Who are the people who remind you of your worth and give you the courage to try again? And who are the people who sit with you as we witness the moral injuries of our time?
Collaborative Poem: Spring Gone Missing
I once believed I knew how much a life is worth.
Sarah Anderson, Lindsay Koshgarian: 10 Ways the GOP’s Big Ugly Bill Could Hurt You
The Trump’s new spending bill represents the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich since chattel slavery.
Joseph Bathanti: Women’s Prison
we round up the kids and bundle them
into a restored salvaged Bluebird school bus,
repainted green, and make the long haul
to Raleigh where their mothers are locked
in Women’s Prison.
Alfred McCoy: America’s New Industrial Revolution
Ten years from now, Trump will be remembered ruefully for having used the full force of presidential power in a failed, futile effort to halt the tides of technological change that, by then, will have launched this country headlong into the world’s new industrial revolution.
Mary Jane White: Summer in Waukon, Iowa
The curly-haired cherub, maybe
Eleven, if that, seated on a concrete step,
In his grey t-shirt, blazoned with the
Slogan “Virginity Rocks” is plucking
The late dandelions and rolling them up
Into spit-wads…
Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg: Calls to GI Hotlines Rise as Service Members Consider Defying Trump’s Orders
“I can’t believe whoever fell for the lie that the military is apolitical, but with Trump, it feels dangerously political, like we’re being used as pawns. We’re the saber that he’s rattling.”
Tony Gloeggler: A Good Bad Day
John walks slowly up the stairs
to my office every day. Between
four and four-thirty, after the bus
brings him home from day program
Miles O’Brien, et al: The scientific impact of Trump’s cuts to NOAA and the National Weather Service
Experts have been warning for months that drastic and sudden cuts at the National Weather Service by Trump could impair their forecasting ability and endanger lives during the storm season. Here is what the science reporter for PBS said in February.
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Petition for this Day
May my modest routines appease me today, I who
raged against them for so long —
Sharon F. McDermott: How to Love a Transcendentalist
Walking across the quad, on my way to my first class, my senses swooned at the sight and scent of blossoms capping the apple trees with billowing clouds. Pink and white petals perfumed the air and spiraled down on breezy days. Bees hummed in the canopies; birds nested there.
