A ponderous great book becomes a portal to the past
That first edition of The Random House Unabridged contains about 300,000 entries. In all, 2,091 thumb-indexed pages. All of this seemed like most of the world’s knowledge to a young me, and flipping through it while lying on the short-napped, striped carpet was, if not my favorite pastime, at least a worthwhile one.
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Reading in a plague year
On New Year’s Day 2020, 24 hours after an initial cluster of COVID-19 cases had been diagnosed in Wuhan, China, I was nose-deep in The Mirror & the Light, the magnificent doorstop conclusion to Dame Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy, soaking up the pageantry and intrigue of Henry VIII’s court. Mantel cast a spell, and I was blissfully unaware of reports radiating outward from East Asia and then from Italy. Doomscrolling was future tense.
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When a place becomes the teacher
Maybe it was the truth in that blue, bedazzling ocean that caused me to trip upon my own comfortable musings. Come on, now, the sea seemed to whisper. Don’t be putting on airs.
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Book Excerpt: Worship the Pig
Gaylord Brewer is a professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro. His books include a cookbook-memoir, The Poet’s Guide to Food, Drink, & Desire, and Worship the Pig, from which this poem is excerpted.
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Book Excerpt: Down
Erin Elizabeth Smith is the creative director at Sundress Academy for the Arts and the managing editor of Sundress Publications. Down is her third full-length poetry collection. Her poems have appeared in Guernica, Ecotone, Mid-American, Tupelo Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, and Willow Springs, among others. She is a Distinguished Lecturer in the English department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and in 2017 she was inducted into the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame.
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Book Excerpt: The Absurd Man
Major Jackson is the author of five volumes of poetry, including Roll Deep and Leaving Saturn, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. In January 2021, he will join the Vanderbilt University faculty as Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English.
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