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Why Wouldn’t I Be Fine?

By Lindsey CrittendenOctober 4, 2018

“You OK?” my husband Craig touches my hand, looks at me. We’re in the car, Sunday evening, driving home. Something shifts inside me, like sand. This experience of having him check in with me is new. After almost fifty years of practice, I’m so used to saying fine that I don’t always feel what I’m…

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Poetry Friday: “I Loved You Before I Was Born”

By Li-Young LeeJune 22, 2018

In clear, resonate language, Li-Young Lee celebrates longing in his poem “I Loved You Before I Was Born.” In its repetition and earnestness, this poem reminds me of e. e. cumming’s poem “i carry your heart with me (i carry it in.” Unlike cumming’s poem though, Lee’s emphasizes the bitter-sweetness of longing and places it…

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Notes on Heresy

By Morgan MeisMay 15, 2018

I haven’t any major gripes with the Roman Catholic Church. On the whole, I feel gratitude. The church took me in when I needed some in-taking. Living in Detroit, however, I have found myself worshipping at Saint Anthony over on the East Side. The Mass at Saint Anthony is presided over by Bishop Karl Rodig,…

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Love Hurts in Phantom Thread

By Nick OlsonMarch 12, 2018

My favorite film from last year is a farce. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread functions like a twisted screwball comedy: Its momentum is the back-and-forth seeking of the upper hand in the relationship between Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) and Alma (Vicky Krieps). But narrative momentum does not always move the viewer. Anderson’s films can be…

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Famous Last Words

By A.G. HarmonOctober 10, 2017

Towards the end of his life, Winston Churchill famously quipped: “I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.” As is always the case with humor, a world of seriousness is implied. For one thing, the statement rests upon an understanding of…

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Poetry Friday: “Underwhelmed”

By Jeffrey ThomsonSeptember 29, 2017

Put on your hiking books and grab your compass, magnifying glass, and shovel: this poem is taking you on an exploratory adventure. What the poem is tracking down is  the manifold concepts in the word “under.” Some of the poem’s “unders” are recognizable: like “under the splay-handed palms,“ “under the coral’s forest of horn,” “under…

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The Spirit’s Indwelling

By Elizabeth DuffySeptember 19, 2017

Beside me this morning is a child at the breakfast table vigorously chewing a Fuji apple and explaining to me the mutative abilities of a small vehicle based on the particular placement of a certain Lego brick. Sometimes the vehicle is a plow, sometimes a combine, depending on whether that brick is before it, behind…

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Parenting by Politics

By Brad FruhauffSeptember 18, 2017

The moment is freeze-framed in my mind: My eldest, Milo, red-faced with anger, his eyes hard but wild, a look I know means he feels both out of control and desperate to re-exert it. The yellow light of the floor lamps casts dark shadows over the couch and his face. Shoot it in black and…

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The Sweetness These Days

By Richard ChessAugust 23, 2017

On the phone, he says, Your mother throws me over her shoulder and carries me across the parking lot to the club house, the dining room. (She rolls his walker to a corner of the dining room where it won’t obstruct the servers and other residents who have come tonight for dinner.) His sense of…

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Rules for the Male Gaze

By Brad FruhauffAugust 2, 2017

Once, in high school, a guy in the trombone section brought a Playboy to band practice and passed it around the horns section. I was on tympani and could see over their shoulders the airbrushed bodies, the unnatural poses, the phony backdrops. Even as a hormonal adolescent I could see the images were crass, gaudy…

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