My imagination wants to redeem the bareness of fact,
so I imagine the field he dies in as a place we might
have picnicked, imagine wind entering his clothes
and leaving again
Read More“Every day from the twelfth to the nineteenth, Alice went over to see Einar. He was lying in bed more often now, which made his feet easier to get at. She removed his socks and massaged his feet, lumpy as they were, because it felt so nice, she knew it did".”
—from “On Narrow Paved Paths” by Dorthe Nors in Wild Swims.
Read More“And I don’t know
what might bring peace on earth. But a man
fallen asleep at his desk while revising
a letter…”
—from “Love Succeeding” by Li-Young Lee from The Undressing
Read More“Her real life was beginning now, and she never doubted its meaning. Among the powerful and strange she would be mute and watchful. She would swim like a little fish, and learn to breathe underwater”
Read More“…the only remedy is to resolutely abandon the larger for the smaller field, to narrow one’s vision to one’s pencil, and do the small thing closely and deeply rather than the big thing loosely and superficially.”
Read MoreEcosystems kept collapsing in sight, out of sight, and I had to work hard to remember that loss and abundance co-exist, and both are true
Read More
I’ve never read a collection of poems that so saliently addresses a life lived with a disability, in the shadows of medical intervention both the ones that linger behind you and the ones that are cast ahead of you, and how the scared body in pain exists in this beautiful and terrifying world. I cried over my coffee more than once as I read these intimate letters between Molly McCully Brown and Susannah Nevison because I found echoed there my experiences, for the first time in literature not found in an obscure medical study found in the Google rabbit hole after a night of pain keeps me awake and wondering why and how I got there and if I am alone with it. I’m not. I have these overheard conversations, like clues toward an answer.
Again and again, came to mind the image of sea glass. Broken, ragged, sharp, raw, but through the tumble of waves something beautiful, smoothed, a story in its own right. These poems were the waves, I am the broken bit of glass from a bottle.
At any point while I am reading (always in my home these days) there is most certainly a basket of clean laundry within reach waiting to be folded and put away, a cup of coffee going cold, an old water cup nobody will claim and take care of, and classical music rasping from the old radio, a sound that has been the backdrop of my life for as long as I can remember and is now the backdrop to my children’s lives.
Revising the Storm by Geffrey Davis is a study in what bruises we bring to love. A study in how we stumble forward trying to gain our footing, sometimes falling all the same, but always, it seems, with a nearby hand outstretched, helping us to our feet. This book is a study in grace and tenderness, grown in the shadow of pain and grief—for where else can grace and tenderness grow?
It is an honor to be invited into the intimacy of these poems.
Usually, Eva thought of herself as a good person. She stayed up at night worrying about the human condition in vague and specific incarnations. She made herself available to the people whom she loved, and s0me whom she didn’t. She gave money to every other homeless person and stopped to let stray kids remind her how much Jesus and the Hare Krishnas loved her, more for the benefit of their souls than hers. Still she wondered sometimes if it wasn’t all pretense—if, when she shut her eyes and wished restitution upon the whole wounded parade of humanity, she wasn’t really wishing away the world that created war and illness so that she might have a world in which there was room to feel sorry for herself. Every day she felt herself losing things it was unacceptable to mourn.
-Danielle Evans, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self
Acts of barbarity can happen fast and on a large scale not when more people turn immoral or evil, not necessarily, but when enough people become numb. When we are indifferent, disconnected, atomised. Too busy with our own lives to care about others. Uninterested in and unmoved by someone else’s pain. That is the most dangerous emotion — the lack of emotion.
Perhaps in an era when everything is in constant flux. in order to be more sane, we need a blend of conscious optimism and creative pessimism. In the words of Gramsci, ‘the pessimism of the intellect, the optimism of the will.’
I believe in the transformative power of stories to bring people together, expand our cognitive horizons, and gently unlock our true potential for empathy and wisdom.
Do not be afraid of complexity.
- Elif Shafak, How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division