The Beinart Notebook is a Substack site with a weekly “show” (via Zoom) in which the journalist Peter Beinart discusses issues concerning Israel-Palestine with his guests. These presentations are a marvelous, even inspiring, model of rational conversation about...
In her paramedic training, Ieva Jusionyte was told, when dealing with gunshot victims, to “always look for the exit wound.” Exit wounds are larger and more irregular than entry wounds, and their location helps medical workers discover the pathway a bullet has taken...
The notion of “the good war”—a just, nationwide effort against an obvious and perilous aggressor—pulses through Matt Gallagher’s latest novel, Daybreak (Simon & Schuster, Feb 20, 2024). This notion has perhaps been freshly reinstated in American public discourse,...
Farewell ValleyBy Im Ch’ŏru, translated from the Korean by Jennifer M. Lee and Jonathan R. Bagley (MerwinAsia, 2016) Readers new to Korean literature who value historical memory as a gateway to truth, reconciliation, and healing will find Farewell Valley a...
Today is a Different WarBy Lyudmyla Khersonska, translations by Olga Livshin, Andrew Janco, Maya Chhabra, and Lev Fridman (Arrowsmith Press, 2023). In the Hour of War: Poetry from UkraineEdited by Carolyn Forché and Ilya Kaminsky, with individual translators cited...
The January 6 Select Congressional Committee released its final report on December 22, 2022. The report is the culmination of the ten hearings the nation has witnessed on television from June through December at intervals. The hearings have had a dramatic impact on...
The King’s TouchTom SleighGraywolf Press 2022 For years, Tom Sleigh was a Boston poet, a Cambridge poet, and he made poems that seemed associated with the interpretive and bookish spirit of those places, writing poems that were deeply and kaleidoscopically...
The Neverending Quest for the Other Shore: An Epic in Three CantosSylvie KandéTranslated by Alexander DickowWesleyan University Press, 2022 Sylvie Kandé’s epic poem, The Neverending Quest for the Other Shore, describes two journeys over water from the west coast of...
Maybe the Land Sings BackBy Jan LaPerleGalileo Books, 2022 Jan LaPerle’s latest poetry collection, Maybe the Land Sings Back, begins and is interspersed with sheet music for Charles Wesley’s 1739 hymn “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing.” The words are omitted, which is...
Cartography: Navigating a Year in IraqKatherine SchifaniPotomac Books, June 2022 The year is 2011, the United States is in the final stages of its two-year withdrawal from Iraq, and Katherine Schifani has been deployed with the US army as the head logistics advisor...
