Pablo Neruda’s only daughter, Malva Marina, was born in Madrid, in August 1934, and died a little over eight years later, in Nazi-occupied Holland, from the complications of hydrocephaly. She hadn’t ...
Tag: Poetry
“Protest Can Be Beautiful”: Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane
In 2007, the Oxford Junior Dictionary, one of the standard reference works ...
Reading to Children to Save Ourselves
My youngest son’s favorite book, this month, is called Little Blue Truck. If you read as much children’s literature as I do, you are well acquainted with the book’s ...
Virtual Roundtable on “The Mana of Mass Society”
Many of anthropology’s terms of art are taken from afar. Especially in the half century after 1870 ...
Toward the Black Girl Future
To read Eve L. Ewing is to read Chicago. Born and raised in the city’s Logan Square neighborhood in the 1980s and 1990s, Ewing’s love for the city is palpable in ...
Reading to Children to Save Ourselves
My youngest son’s favorite book, this month, is called Little Blue Truck. If you read as much children’s literature as I do, you are well acquainted with the book’s ...
From “Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker”
Reading writers’ letters is the best kind of eavesdropping. It brings the rush and ...
Native Stories from Native Perspectives
“We are from people that have been forced to give up everything and we have this one opportunity to give something to ourselves and we’re going to take it. We are fucking taking it. Even though ...
Kill Your Idols
In April of 1966, Andy Warhol held the first of his now infamous Exploding Plastic Inevitable events at the Polski Dom Narodowy on St. Mark’s Place. A healthy buzz had already developed in the ...
Atlantic Got Your Tongue
Safia Elhillo’s poetry comes to us exactly when we need it, in the era of the travel ban and the border wall. The richness of feeling and formal inventiveness of her work open up an alternative ...
Are You Nobody Too?
Early in 1862, Emily Dickinson began one of her poems with a startling announcement: “I can wade Grief – / Whole Pools of it – / I’m used to that – / But the least push of Joy / Breaks up my feet.” The British filmmaker Terence ...
Poetry in Times of Crisis
Even on a college campus, you rarely spot a poem out in the open. When you do, it’s often a sign that something terrible has happened. In the days after the 2016 presidential election, I came across ...
Breaking the ESL Student’s Imagination
The creation of vivid, readable, and faithful translations of literary works into English calls not only for considerable expertise in the original language, but also for consummate writerly skill in ...
Boss Poet
Little has changed since Bruce Springsteen explained the origin of his song “Thunder Road” to a seething crowd at the Capitol Theater in Passaic, New Jersey, on September 19, 1978. “There was this ...
A Storm of Words
Imagine a world where the hottest degree was an MPA, a Masters in Poetry Administration. Where a single poem could send global financial markets into a spin, where poets were the envy of all, and ...
The Belle and the Bard
The First Folio held court in Amherst, MA, late last spring, when purple graduation balloons hovered over the green hills of the college and minivans lined its streets. For the younger siblings, the ...
12 Anti-Inspirational Quotes from Dorothy Parker
Happy birthday, Dorothy Parker! Born on this day in 1893, Parker would come to entertain and condole the truly wicked among us with her acerbic tongue and unforgettable one-liners. We’ve gathered 12 ...
Can You Name the Authors of these Poems about April?
National Poetry Month is in full swing! We’ve combed through our poetry anthologies for allusions to April. Can you match the lines to their authors?
Quiz: Gertrude Stein or a Children’s Book?
In her essay “In The Great Green Room,” Anne E. Fernald discusses the surprising influence of literary modernism on Margaret Wise Brown, author of the legendary children’s book Goodnight Moon (1946) ...
On Our Nightstands: January 2016
Here at Public Books, our editorial staff and contributors are hard at work to provide readers with thought-provoking articles, but when the workday is done, what is actually on our nightstands? Here ...