We don’t think enough—or at least I don’t—about how objects can contain memory. But Murray Bodo’s poem “Sewing Box” shows us how: in this box in which memory is literally contained. Each of the four stanzas takes us deeper into the box. At first it’s just “the busy / sewing box I’d organize on visits…

First of all, it makes everyone hate you at parties. We all know that it’s downright rude to correct the person who’s standing next to you holding a glass of white wine when she says, “for him and I.”  Grammar is one thing.  But sometimes the problem is facts, and facts matter. I was in…

The ongoing conversation about contemporary literature and faith that I have been having with Dana Gioia and Paul Elie across half a dozen print and online venues, though it has touched on a dozen different issues, ultimately comes down to one: “absence” versus “presence.” The question Elie has raised, you may recall, is whether we…

Two weeks ago I put on the moss agate ring my great-grandmother won selling magazines in the red dirt of her Oklahoma girlhood. I still wear a wedding band and it keeps the moss agate’s roomy rose-gold band from slipping off my finger. But the wedding band can’t keep the moss agate steady and the…