I’m very glad to announce that the Los Angeles Review of Books has just published my review of Eliza Griswold’s Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America. Read my review here.
This was a deeply challenging and rewarding project for me, since Griswold’s book is a portrait of the small Pennsylvania village, Amity, where I grew up and still have family. To read her work, and then respond, reminded me of how, as my friend Kate Schapira once said to me, “writing is a way to understand the world.”
The piece comments more explicitly on a specific issue (i.e., fracking) than most of what I do on this site and in my poetry life generally. It’s good sometimes, I think, to hop to the other side of the fence. There is information there.