The Reading Life
Wonder, Despite: A Review of AFTER JUNE
Like many writers, she wondered if she shouldn’t give up. Why were we squandering time and money on art that few, if any, would read? The answer, as always, is because we have to.
Review of Getting to Gardisky Lake
As I carried Paul J. Willis 2016 collection, Getting to Gardisky Lake with me for the last several weeks, I found innumerable mantrams among the poems, grounding myself amidst Willis’ stories of the wilderness, the classroom, of aging and of loving. It seems there is nothing his poetry does not touch...
Review of Light When It Comes By Chris Anderson
That very quality of tenderness—and honesty, and sincerity, and authenticity—is what marks Light When It Comes. The book is arranged in ten short chapters which themselves are broken into what can only be described as pericopes—the kind of fragments of narrative and utterance that make up the scriptures themselves.
Review of One Ordinary Sunday: A Meditation on the Mystery of the Mass, by Paula Huston
The book is no mere introduction to Catholic worship for outsiders; it is a piece of spiritual autobiography that invites us into the vulnerable moments of reflection, resistance, reawakening, and simple rejoicing that occur on “an ordinary Sunday” in the course of the Mass.
Review of Finding Livelihood: A Progress of Work and Leisure
My story isn’t all that unfamiliar to anyone: mid-twenties, college graduate, part-time jobs, multiple moves and housemates, one dog. Most of us live the dream at this time of our lives: poverty-level incomes with no (human) dependents. Don’t get me wrong—I am pleased.
Creative Lives Part 2
I'm thrilled that they've allowed us to share their conversation with you in this series titled "Creative Lives". You can read part 1 here—part 2 starts with a shared love of Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon’s poetry, and the way that those works and others informed the writing lives of these two poets.
Review of Catherine Abbey Hodges, Instead of Sadness
Teeming with imagery and intelligence, Catherine Abbey Hodges’s Instead of Sadness(Gunpowder Press, 2016) is as much a collection of moments as of poetry. With dovelike gentleness, each piece rests on the thoughts and images of a particular moment, held aloft by the layeredness of meaning that makes up the...
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Ruminate Community
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The Waking is an online literary magazine and a part of the Ruminate creative community that houses high-quality literary writing about what it’s like to be human. We are interested in short-form prose and image-text hybrid work. This art can be beautiful, it can be strange, we just ask that it feels true.