Steven Leyva, The Understudy’s Handbook. Washington Writers’ Publishing House. 2020
Elizabeth Hazen, Girls Like Us. Alan Squire Publishing. 2020
Dora Malech, Flourish. Carnegie Mellon University Press. 2020
At least several times a week, it occurs to me that this needs to be our city motto. There’s a deep pool of poetic talent in this town. Here we take a look at new collections from three of our best.
Halloween feels different this year. Masks are now everyday attire; unable to tell friend from foe, we perceive threat everywhere. A shroud hovers in the air from coast to coast. Our fellow Americans are gasping for breath. In short, it’s hard to take pleasure in fear.
It’s hard to imagine a more opportune time to contemplate the lives we’re not leading. After five months of quarantine, however, finding the motivation to do so might be even harder. Where to begin? How to proceed? Luckily, Johns Hopkins English professor Andrew H. Miller has written the perfect guidebook to accompany us on this journey.
“The best thing that ever happened to my writing life was breaking my ankle,” Baltimore author Laura Bogart proclaimed in 2015. At the time of the accident, Bogart, now 37, was writing mainly nonfiction, and she’d already met with success as an essayist. Her personal reflections on a range of hot-button topics—sizeism and feminism, politics and pop culture—often went viral on Salon. (She’s now a featured writer at The Week and a contributing editor at DAME).
