“If all (hu)mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.” E. O. Wilson My wonderful friend Marc Bekoff (who just so happens to be super-tight buddies with Jane Goodall–which almost makes […]

Brett Foster, The Garbage Eater (Evanston, IL: TriQuarterly Books, 2011).   It is said that we are what we eat, that our appetites and outputs are in sync. Often, that’s also the case in the relationship between reading and writing. In reading Brett Foster’s debut poetry collection, The Garbage Eater, it becomes readily apparent that—for […]

In “William Banks’s Wager,” Brett Foster reconstructs a letter from William Banks, a British clerk who venerated the famous Mount Grace Priory, in which Banks beseeches the monks’ prayers and confesses, with slight pleasure, a certain theft.

In a weary admonition, the narrator of “Luke 13:30: Tired Application” instructs us to be watchful at the end of days, to look with grim hope at the “One coming who’s casting out devils, making the blind see.”

Mary Van Denend reviews Anne Doe Overstreet’s first book of poems, Delicate Machinery Suspended.

I just can’t figure out which is more offensive: 1) The statements made years ago by Mike Jeffries, CEO of A&F. 2) The ‘shock’ of the middle to upperclass masses who were, apparently, oblivious to how horrible they were to overweight and poor people in middle/high school. (Seriously? These comments came as a surprise to […]

How can Christian engagement in conversations around human rights claims be sharpened by considering Karl Marx’s scepticism of such rhetoric?

Federal Judge Phyllis Hamilton has ordered the Pentagon to release the names of those who train and teach at the government funded training facility in Georgia: the SOA, or, more recently named, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. The name change was intended to show a new direction the SOA was taking, but even […]

Meredith Kunsa’s prose poem retells the memory of a Pentecostal service where her grandmother, “jabbering in a voice” she cannot understand, gives a command that both haunts Kunsa and compels her to conclude that there is no Jesus in her, that “I’m not who I think I am.”