I’m rereading Paradise, Victoria Redel’s most recent collection of poems. Beginning with some midrashic poems, retellings of the story of the Garden of Eden, the book moves on to poems about family, childhood, adolescence, parenting, desire, aging, memory, menstruation, and more. Poems that, at a glance, don’t appear to have anything to do with paradise and the loss of paradise. Yet, on a fourth and fifth reading, I see how deeply connected some of the common experiences of, say, aging,...| Slant Books
I don’t know the desert. I’ve slept in a palm-branch hut, rented for $1 a night from a Bedouin, by the Red Sea in the Sinai Peninsula when it was under Israeli control. I’ve spent hours in a broken down Jeep waiting for help somewhere in the Sinai. I’ve watched the sunrise from atop Masada in the Judean Desert. Just a few weeks ago, I visited Joshua Tree National Park, where two deserts, the Mojave and the Colorado, meet.| Slant Books
Despite some fifty years now of “experimental fiction,” the majority of current novels I’ve read still aim for the Roman arch structure—but fail miserably. I’m mostly thinking of books in the “blockbuster midlist” category, like Jonathan Franzen’s works. Like the painstaking ratchet of roller coaster cars up the incline, these novels develop complex action and character so meticulously that they are forced to cut loose in the final third, the cars careening downhill in the kin...| Slant Books
One day for reasons unknown I was struck with this image of a boy riding with his father along a back country road. When I put myself in that boy’s shoes, I couldn’t help but see from the perspective of my own boyhood, which put them in North Carolina, and made the boy’s father a Vietnam combat veteran—someone big, powerful, and dangerous, as my stepfather was (or at least that’s how I saw him at the time).| Slant Books
On a bench overlooking Holmes Beach on Anna Maria Island, I listened to my brother describe the situation and lay out the options: Mom’s not drinking or eating. The end is near. We can continue with hospice at Brookdale, the assisted living place where she’d been living for the last year, or we can have her moved to a residential hospice center where they are better equipped to provide all the care available to keep her comfortable.| Slant Books
The prayer book’s title, Mishkan T’filah, comes from this verse: “And let them build Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them” (Exodus 25:8). “Mishkan T’filah,” write Rabbis Elyse D. Frishman and Peter S. Knobel, editor and chair of the editorial committee respectively, “is a dwelling place for prayer, one that moves with us wherever we might be physically or spiritually.”| Slant Books
I accompany you as you hold onto your walker, taking one difficult step after another, inching your way, labored breath by breath, toward the dining room, a meal you refuse to eat. My life, as it always has been, is elsewhere. So, every day we FaceTime. We don’t have much to say to each other now. But with many words or few, distant or near, we still, as long as you are in this world, know each other’s presence.| Slant Books