Katie Kapurch: Why ‘Barbie’ and ‘The Little Mermaid’ made 2023 the dead girl summer
These dead girls offer insights about living. Embracing death’s inevitability brings some freedom, as well as access to truths about time and the natural world.
Baron Wormser: Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Epitaph”
By tradition, poets have the authority to write epitaphs. It goes with their famous license, their claiming the verbal right to confront death in whatever context death presents itself while using poetry’s concision to arrive at a just, incisive summary.
Baron Wormser: Ghosts
All the chatter about “family values” presupposes that women pick up whatever difficulties they are faced with and go forward with a happy, maternal smile. Seduced and abandoned does not exist in such an aggressively wholesome universe.
Doug Anderson: Shakespeare in the Schools
I grew up with Shakespeare. Even the working class side of the family could quote his poetry and apply it to their lives. Reading Shakespeare created imaginative range and intellectual … Continue reading
