In honor of Carson McCullers’ birthday: I could be difficult like Carson McCullers. I could drink too much have wild fantasies about what the next exciting trip would be believe that I deserved to be loved and doted on love inordinately but badly treat those around me with indifference All because of genius—charge it to […]
It’s been another good year for this Heartlands site. The number of views has almost doubled and we have had a number of good connections with and reviews from other sites. Below you’ll find the Top 10 posts from the year along with some other notable posts in the realms of books, interviews, and poetry. […]
Christian Wiman made the Best Reads last year with his memoir He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, The Faith of Art. It was poetry itself. This year his 2017 collection of poetry itself, Joy: 100 Poems, graces the list. Wiman has a wonderful soul, as we all do and would notice if we just paid […]
This is the 3rd year for the highly-anticipated Heartlands Best Reads list. If you want to check out previous years you can look here (2018) and here (2017). How does a book make the Heartlands list? Well, the main limiting factor is that Alex Joyner has to read it during the year. It’s been another […]
About halfway through Kimberly Johnson’s 2002 poetry collection, Leviathan With a Hook, you find yourself face-to-face with the themes that have since come to characterize much of her work: a moment that opens the world, a rich encounter with nature and transcendence, and a little hint of disturbing fire. It’s all right there in “Up […]
Scott Cairns is still carrying on his affair with Erato, the Greek muse he addresses throughout his poetry. “I wanted very much/ to find a word to grant us both assurance” he says in the poem “Erato at 64.” At such an age, lovers and poets know that the beloved is as much within them […]
Around a table at El Mag as the days grow short. A warm place in the early dark of December. I had a Burrito To Go— misnamed because I always eat it there. There are so few lights on the peninsula at night; much more darkness as raccoons meander across untraveled roads. Waves lap empty […]
There are days I wake up in sluggish wonder, newly aware, as a last dream image drifts away, of the marvel of my beloved still beside me in the bed, the fan beating time through the air, and the persistence of this body and mind. Or as the poet Franz Wright would put it in […]
Come for the instruction in how to write poems. Stay for the poetry that flows from Mary Oliver like an undiminished spring. “Poetry is a life-cherishing force. And it requires a vision—a faith, to use an old-fashioned term. Yes, indeed. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down […]
In the previous segment of our interview with Virginia Reeves, we talked about the origins of her new book, The Behavior of Love, and the inspiration for one of its main characters, Ed, a behaviorist working within a Montana institution. In the second part of the interview we discuss behavior, identity, and the windows of […]
