Word of the Week: inchoate (ĭn-KŌ-ĭt) Definition (Adjective) Just begun, incipient; in an initial or early stage; hence elementary, imperfect, undeveloped, immature. In Context “In black America, cultural conservatism takes the form of an inchoate xenophobia (e.g., against whites, Jews, and Asians), systemic sexism, and homophobia.” Cornel West, Race Matters, 1993.
Book of the Month: Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison Critical Assessment “Thanks to this narrative method and Ms. Morrison's magisterial yet sensuous prose, ''Beloved'' possesses the heightened power and resonance of myth - its characters, like those in opera or Greek drama, seem larger than life and their actions, too, tend to strike us as enactments of ancient rituals and passions. To describe ''Beloved'' only in these terms, however, is to diminish its immediacy, for the novel also remains precisely grounded in an American reality -the reality of black history as experienced in the wake of the Civil [...]
The Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys Critical Evaluation “By night, I attended classes at University College Cork where, as part of an English-literature module, I first read Jean Rhys’s beautiful and subversive Wide Sargasso Sea. Here were words engaged in a different sort of taking apart. ‘Rhys took one of the works of genius of the 19th century and turned it inside-out to create one of the works of genius of the 20th century,’ Michele Roberts has said of Wide Sargasso Sea. The novel didn’t just take inspiration from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, it illuminated and confronted it, challenged the narrative. The shorthand [...]
Ghazal Circling Fatherhood Carlos Andrés Gómez My mother exalts her long-gone father. Driving home, laments the failings of my father. Sees her ex-husband in my excuses, tells me: That’s just like your father. On holiday, he sneaks away to work; I take a work call. Like son, like father. Before, I tried to outrun my shadow when sun met twilight, like Earth’s late father. God sacrificed his son for his life’s work. So we sing heavenward to honor the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—Forgive me, for I have sinned, become my own father— not who raised me, but those [...]
Critical Evaluation "Books of advice come in many forms: financial, spiritual, physical, philosophical. Novels too are books of advice, if read in a certain light. Eve Babitz understood, for example, that part of Colette’s greatness is that you can open her novels anywhere and “brush up on what to do.” There are only two advice books I’ve read more than once. One is Tom Hodgkinson’s “How to Be Idle” (2004). Its title is self-explanatory. The other is J.P. Donleavy’s “The Unexpurgated Code” (1975). Its title is less so. Donleavy’s book is a sendup of the form that happens to be, possibly, [...]
jeroboam (jĕr-ə-BŌ-əm) Definition (Noun) A large bowl or goblet; a very large wine-bottle. In Context "And a jeroboam of 1945 Mouton-Rothschild – from the private cellar of Baroness Philippine de Rothschild, the château's owner, no less – sold for an astounding $310,700." David Sokolin, Investing in Liquid Assets: Uncorking Profits in Today's Global Wine Market, 2008.
Critical Evaluation "We critics are guilty of emphasizing, ad nauseam, the novella’s size. Our epithets (“short,” “slim,” “brief”) imply slightness, something lesser than, as if we owe the reader a trigger warning: not a novel. "But who doesn’t want to finish a book over the course of a weekend? "For those of you who do, the Irish writer Claire Keegan’s beautiful new novella, “Foster,” is no less likely to move you than any heaping 400-page tome you’ll read this year. "The narrator is a young girl in rural Ireland who is sent by her parents to live with the Kinsella family [...]
In Praise of Poetry By Eliza Browning As we wrap up National Poetry Month, an annual celebration of poetry held every April, I’ve been thinking about the power of poetry to resonate with readers in both universal and unexpected ways: how a single impactful poem can capture a specific emotion or experience and stay with you for a lifetime. What makes a poem impactful is often far more specific and less straightforward than prose, making reading poetry a deeply personal experience. I’m often drawn to poetry that features a vivid, striking, and unexpected use of language, articulates or conveys something universal [...]
Magnitude and Bond Cortney Lamar Charleston after Gwendolyn Brooks that which is betwixt us of the lampooned lips and noses indissoluble as blood impassioned by a serene swatch of sky— envy of the blessing of birds and the divine shadow cast to provide protective canvas for our bones of calcified light the chains that wore us in the fashion of diamond-studded pendants and the names that the ocean omitted from history with a wave envy of the privilege of birds and the low-hung cumulus carried in baskets through the blistering heat by blistered hands the wade into waters as stoic as windows during sudden [...]
The Owl Gia Anansi-Shakur after Louise Glück’s “October” Violence has changed me something beautiful worldly, not comfortable living in a mouth I’ve long made habit of pulling off my skin by the forearm at night joining the arteries of lapping tongues and hardened wounds. I’ve found joy meditating on the quality of my self served stigmatas fracturing the columns of holy books An owl opens its mouth a church bell climbs out akimbo She has learned to tightrope in the dark Copyright © 2025 by Gia Anansi-Shakur. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 3, 2025, by the Academy of American [...]
