Each Friday at Good Letters we feature a poem from the pages of Image, selected and introduced by one of our writers or readers. I like a poem to surprise me, and Marjorie Stelmach’s “Canticle of Want” (Image issue 86)  is full of the unexpected. Recently I’ve been praying St. Francis’s famous “Canticle”: “All praise be…

Are you as numb to news of war as I am? We the American public are so used to hearing that our country is acting militarily in yet another place on the globe that we don’t even question whether we should be arming the Saudi Arabian forces in Yemen or “supporting” Syrian so-called moderate rebels.…

I am boarding a plane to Detroit, and so is she, her thick coat falling onto my lap from the center aisle, the smell of smoke thick enough to make my head swim. She shoves the coat under her seat, her thick gray hair brushing my arm as she sits. “I’m Dianne,” she tells me,…

The following is an indirect response to Kathryn Schulz’s article “Pond Scum: Henry David Thoreau’s Moral Myopia,” from The New Yorker, October 19, 2015: “I have travelled,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in Walden, “a good deal in Concord: and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing…

My children’s Michigan fact book says you can’t go more than eight miles without hitting water in this state, but it must be less this far north. I imagine the land shifting and disappearing beneath my feet as it does at the shoreline, except I’m standing in my kitchen. “You’re basically living on a big…

My boy is a bit of a science geek. He subscribes to Discover and Popular Science. They are both styled after the fashion of other pop magazines in an attempt to appeal to non-scientists (“Cold Fusion: A Special Investigation”). Popular Science focuses on technology. The past year’s issues have featured an invisible, invincible war ship,…

The second season of Showtime’s The Affair premiered at the beginning of October. In the show, Noah, a forty-something apparently-happily-married novelist, goes to Montauk for the summer with his wife and kids. He meets Alison, who is also married, about ten years his junior, and still grieving the tragic death of her young son years earlier.…

Black. Muslim. American. Woman. Poet. The languages she spoke. The ground on which she stood, singing her suffering, power, anger, love. Between the painful past and the dreamed of future: her presence. That’s what I remember. More than the timber of her voice. Definitely more than the poems she read that Saturday afternoon. Fall, 1977.…

Recently I ran across the following sentences in a status update and, in short, wanted to run over my tablet with the lawnmower: “Sin isn’t very chic to talk about these days. Words like: brokenness, psychological issues, maladjustment, and trauma are way more palatable. But woe to us if we completely ignore sin.” I copied…

If a pair of writer/directors exists that can rival Joel and Ethan Coen for a body of work with profound depictions of humanity, it is another set of brothers. The films of the Dardennes, Jean-Pierre and Luc, have consistently been among the best of modern offerings and were a main feature in an essay I…