I met a little boy new to the neighborhood this evening when I was pulling weeds in my yard. “Why are you in the dirt?” he asked, trundling to where I crouched. “I’m pulling weeds.” “Why?” “So that there’s there more room for the flowers.” “Why?” “Because I like the flowers.” “Why?” “Because they’re pretty.”…

Sometimes a poet will take a familiar story but re-tell it from the point of view of a minor character. That’s what Kathleen L. Housley is doing in “The Cartographer of Disaster”: she gives us the biblical story of Noah and the Flood from the viewpoint of the raven that Noah sends out after the…

Growing up in southern California, I experienced the uneasy allure of the Santa Ana’s hot fall and winter winds that swept down from Nevada’s Great Basin. They whipped up the dust and screamed against the windowpanes. In the drier mountain areas, they ignited fires; in my coastal town, they seemed to blow the stars through…

Among those who work on behalf of them, it has become a truism that our first obligation toward our less fortunate brothers and sisters is to first recognize and celebrate their humanity. What is less often recognized is the vital role that art can play in such a process.