How Zibby Owens Got Back Into Writing After Staying Home With 4 Kids
For a long time, as is often the case with mothers, Zibby Owens’s life was wholly centered on her four children. For more than a decade, the author and host of the podcast Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books was a stay-at-home mom. She was still busy — her preferred state of being, she […]
Viewing the Ob-scene: On Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest”
A MAN IS being murdered outside a child’s window. A prisoner of Auschwitz, he was caught fighting with another captive. As punishment, he’s being drowned in a river. We can’t see the incident, but the child can. He moves over to the window and looks out beyond our field of vision. Almost immediately, he withdraws […]
Seven Unexpectedly Intimate Poetry Books to Read in March
In three of this month’s collections, we find ourselves in the shower with the speaker. In Armen Davoudian’s opening poem, a mother and son: the speaker steps out in his mother’s “lavender robe de chambre,” careful not to spill though “you’d forgive the spillage, or forget.” The poem ends, “What else will you love me […]
Lost Boys: On a Hidden Fraternity of the Forsaken in the American West
All images from The Crick , published by Twin Palms Publishers. © Jim Mangan. 1. The boys arrive slowly, appearing one by one on horseback over the lip of the ravine, plunging down the steep banks with their mounts sliding on their hocks, or in the case of Ephraim arriving in a truck pulling a […]
A Conflict-Theatre Troupe Visits a Land of Strife (Columbia University)
The director and translator Bryan Doerries stood by the stage in Columbia University’s Miller Theatre the other night, watching an audience of students, faculty, and alumni file in. Since 2006, Doerries, who founded Theater of War Productions, has put on performances in locations riven by trauma and strife: military bases, prisons, gang-dominated neighborhoods, opioid-gripped towns. […]