Reiter’s Block welcomes back regular reader and contributor Donal Mahoney. The characters in Donal’s poems are drawn from our everyday life, but the issues they confront have cosmic significance. They’re fresh and down-to-earth yet also timeless, as the gospel stories must have sounded to their original audience. Nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart
Donal Mahoney: “Easter at the Nursing Home” Read More »
Winner of the 2013 PEN Center USA Award in Poetry, Amanda Auchter’s exquisite new collection The Wishing Tomb (Perugia Press, 2012) surveys the cultural history of New Orleans over three centuries, in poems that quiver and shake with music and surge with the violence of floods. End-notes provide background on the incidents that inspired each
Two Poems from Amanda Auchter’s “The Wishing Tomb” Read More »
Poet and political historian Diana Anhalt moved to Mexico with her family in 1950, where her parents joined a community of left-wing expatriates who’d left the U.S. to escape Senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-Communist persecutions. She would live there for the next 50 years. The full text of her nonfiction book A Gathering of Fugitives: American
Two Poems from Diana Anhalt’s “Lives of Straw” Read More »
As April is National Poetry Month, I thought I’d give my blog readers some relief from the theological heavy lifting, and share some excerpts and reviews of the poets I’ve enjoyed lately. I picked up Heather Christle’s The Difficult Farm at the Octopus Books table at AWP 2011 because of the haunted-looking one-eared rabbit peering
Two Poems from Heather Christle’s “The Difficult Farm” Read More »
In this second post in my occasional series on abuse survivors in the church, I’d like to reflect on some of the spiritual gifts that have emerged through my recovery, and how the church could offer greater scope for them to be exercised. It’s a delicate matter even to frame the issue this way. Our
Survivors in Church: Our Spiritual Gifts Read More »
My prison pen pal “Conway” has made good use of his time to write poetry while he waits for a hearing on his early release petition. Here, he shares a brief intense lyric that he wrote inside a card with his original artwork, inspired by Salvador Dali’s melting clock faces in the painting “Persistence of
New Poem by Conway: “Indignance of Time” Read More »
Every year I receive two Lenten devotional booklets from charities that I support, Food for the Poor and Episcopal Relief & Development. The charities have similar missions to relieve poverty in developing countries, through direct aid and (in the case of ERD) micro-lending and educational projects to help the locals become self-sufficient. The booklets, though,
A Tale of Two Devotionals Read More »
Lent gives Christians a refreshing opportunity to bring the topic of sin out into the open. In this season, we’re reminded that Christ’s love takes away our shame and sets us free to be honest. Hopefully this invitation generates not only personal repentance but critical thinking about what we consider sinful, and why. Contemplating the
Good Christians Don’t Feel… Read More »
In this latest poem from my prison pen pal “Conway“, he makes a pun on California’s “three-strikes” sentencing law, which condemned him to 25 years to life for receiving stolen goods. He is still awaiting a court date on his early release petition pursuant to the law’s repeal in 2012. Throwing Strikes In this deserted
New Poem by Conway: “Throwing Strikes” Read More »
For several years, I’ve had a quirky practice of giving up so-called good things for Lent: going to church, for instance. One year I gave up Lent for Lent. But this year, that seems like a way of avoiding focus in my spiritual self-assessment — “giving up” something so large and vague that it doesn’t
Lent at My Fingertips Read More »