It was near the end of winter’s long tail—that time after the thaw but before blossom and bud, when it’s tough to believe that the buoyant lift of spring will ever come—when I began to perceive that something was different. Began noticing how, after two especially exhausting years, we seemed to be holding our hurt …
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/ross-gay-inciting-joy/ Ross Gay is a poet, essayist, professor, and avid gardener and orchardist based in Bloomington, Ind. His 2015 Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. The Book of Delights (2019) became a New York Times Best Seller. His latest book, Inciting Joy (Algonquin), is …
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/angela-garbes-essential-labor/ Angela Garbes’s new book, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change (Harper Wave), weaves together scholarly research and astute political insights with the particularities of her own experience as a Filipina American woman, mother, and daughter to examine the history, the pandemic-wrought present, and the possible future of care work in the United States. I …
In most of the world’s mythologies, spring symbolizes renewal, relief, and reprieve, a generative upswell of energy after the long, dark freeze of winter. But to rise, like sap, to meet the season requires reserves and hinges upon a period of rest and replenishment in the fallow, dark months. This year, though, spring has blown …
The texts and emails started right away. Earlier this spring, when Julia, an HBO Max original series “inspired by Julia Child’s extraordinary life and her long-running television series, The French Chef,” premiered, I began getting questions from writers, editors, colleagues and friends. Did that actually happen? No one was writing to ask me about Julia …
Sometimes, when I shovel snow or pull weeds from the mulched paths in my garden, unearthing a collection of squiggling red earthworms, everything seems OK. “Normal,” even. As if this earth we inhabit is the same as it was more than three decades ago, when I was the age my twins are now, watching snow …
It’s Friday, two days since I told my husband our marriage is over. I wake to find that the dishwasher, the washing machine, and the basement humidifier have all broken. I am incredulous, and I rage around the house, unhinged and wild-haired. I report to my almost-ex-husband on the appliance misfortune. He calls it an …
Has it really only been a year? This is what I found myself thinking as I revisited a piece I wrote on reading with my twin children in 2020. Did I really write that before the Capitol was stormed? Before the beautiful, relentless snows of February? Before any of us had signed up for vaccines? …
Ross Gay is asking for our attention. Wielding luscious everyday words—Ashmead’s kernel, feverfew, rudbeckia—and filling the mouth with linguistic play—thank you what in us rackets glad / what gladrackets us—to the plumage of his own purple scarf, his salmon-colored button down shirt, he beckons us in, points, demands: Come with me. Look here. Feel this. …
At my house, these days, we eat ice cream every day. By we, I mean my nearly 5-year-old twins and me. You heard me right: ice cream. Every day. Sometimes even twice. My kids and I have also been eating dinner in front of the TV together a couple nights a week. I recently admitted …