Category: Literature

POETRY MONDAY: October 3, 2022
By Categories: Literature, Poetry Monday

                     Hilary Russell

Good morning, everyone.  Fall is upon us, it seems.  Apples are ripe and abundant, and so does nature nourish and sustain us.

Our poet today, Hilary Russell, has had an interesting life.  Having grown up outside of New York City, he now lives in the Berkshires, in Western Massachusetts.  He holds a bachelor’s degree from Villanova University and a master’s from Wesleyan University.  But what is interesting is what he now does for a living.  After teaching high school English for many years, he took up small boat building and, through his company, Berkshire Boat Building School, he teaches classes in boat-building.  While many, if not most poets have college and graduate school degrees, few, if any, build boats.

His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Boulevard, The George Washington Review, and other well-known journals.  He is the author of Giving up the House, a chapbook (Mad River Press); The Anthology of American Poetry (Wayside Press), and The Portable Writer (Wayside Continue reading POETRY MONDAY: October 3, 2022

A Connecting Door by David Glessal Millar new from IPBooks
By Categories: Literature, Psychoanalysis

Click Here to Purchase: A Connecting Door by David Glessal Millar new from IPBooks

Praise for A Connecting Door;

If you pick up David Millar‘s book, you will find it hard to put down.

On the one hand it’s a kind of detective story, reminiscent of Ferdinand Mount’s brilliant Kiss Myself Goodbye. In this case the subject is not an aunt but himself; a boy from Birmingham born in the middle of the Second World War to a gents’ tailor and outfitters assistant and the daughter of a shop keeper. It’s about what happened to them, what happened to him, what happened all around him and what he did to himself.
On the other hand, the boy, now a very experienced psychoanalyst, who writes the book looks back at himself to draw conclusions about fundamental matters in being human and alive in our era of excess and of breaking our planetary boundaries.

Combining the personal and philosophical in an accessible way, Millar’s book creates highly moving, intelligent and unusual analysis providing a powerful antidote to the modern politics of identity, “more more” and ‘someone is to blame”. For those who don’t know how psychoanalysis has moved on, it will be a revelation. Millar uses his depth knowledge of the subject to offer a compelling set of ideas about how we might face and even survive the catastrophe we humans have been bringing on ourselves. —

–Professor David Tuckett. Emeritus Professor of Decision-Making, University College London (UCL), Senior Research Fellow, the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford and Distinguished Fellow, British Psychoanalytic Society.

The Weekly Reader from the Yiddish Book Center
By Categories: Arts, History, Literature

The long and complicated history of Jews in Ukraine was not always a happy one, but it would be a mistake to think of it as an unmitigated series of upheavals. To the contrary, the region gave rise to some of the greatest achievements of Jewish literature and culture, as the collections of the Yiddish Book Center bear witness. As exhibit A, you can listen to this program of readings and songs from Yiddish works in translation by Yiddish writers from Ukraine including Blume Lempel, Mendel Osherowitz, Dora Shulner, and Sholem Aleichem.

View our map of Yiddish writers who were born or lived or worked in Ukraine
Continue reading The Weekly Reader from the Yiddish Book Center

POETRY MONDAY: JULY 4, 2022
By Categories: Literature, Poetry Monday

                               P.D. PIN

           

Good morning, everyone.  Happy (we hope) Fourth of July, here in the good old U.S.A., in a year when we’re all worried about whether we still have a
democracy.  The good news today is that we’re finally getting somewhere with our gun laws — a bipartisan result that means we’re also finally getting somewhere with bi-partisanship.

Enough about that.  Now it time for the healing of our souls with poetry.  Our poet this morning is a brand-new one with a modest publishing history but a fascinating background.

P.D. Pin was born and raised in southwestern Ontario.  Her parents moved to Canada before she was born from Friuli, Italy, a region bordering Austria and Slovenia.  She lived in several places, like Milan, Italy, St. John’s, Newfoundland and Toronto, Ontario before moving to Western Massachusetts in 2011.

She has an undergraduate degree from the University of Western Ontario in London and a Master of Fine Arts in poetry and translation from Vermont College.  Since 2014 she has worked at The Mount, Edith Wharton’s homestead in Lenox, MA; first as a docent, then as bookstore manager, and currently as Public Programs Director. Continue reading POETRY MONDAY: JULY 4, 2022