Category: Reflections

Cynical Optimism

A writer probes the all-too-cheery world of an optimist.

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Rumination

“I think often about this evening, and what my friend as trying to tell me. Something about appearances, how things seldom are how they seem? But this is too banal, and she is clever.”

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The Rains of Macondo: Relevance, Our Country Friends, and the Literature of the Pandemic

“The rain described by García Márquez seemed compellingly similar to the virus that had upended my own life and the lives of so many others: impersonal, unrelenting, and showing no sign of ending any time soon.”

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My Mother, the Dumping Ground

“I love my mother, but how is anyone supposed to respond to an endless bucket of support?”

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Persimmons of another tree: a transfem’s song of love and rejuvenation

“When I say room I mean this space that contains me. / When I say this space that contains me I mean I fill this space. / When I say I fill this space I mean this space is my body.”

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Nothing Like Mom’s Cooking: Reflections from Professor Mommy’s Daughter

A reflection on the nourishment our mothers provide, both physical and emotional.

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To See Something And Say Something

“To ask people to tell what’s suspicious and unusual is to expose innocent individuals to a system that constantly profiles and projects fear, to always assume the worst.”

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Things So Obvious They Almost Make No Sense: Defamiliarization and the Default in Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From

“I couldn’t discern an agenda, political, spiritual, or otherwise, and yet the novel felt anything but aimless. Primarily, it read and resonated like poetry.”

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Mud

“There is no membrane between my body and the earth; it’s the kinship of mud on mud.”

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Through the Haze of My Mind

One writer searches for clarity and finds mindfulness.

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Perfect Songs

“The dead linger after their passing in the memories of those who knew them; this poem, however, lingers only on my hard drive, contextless and adrift in the sea of my thoughts and memories.”

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Escape of the Princetonian

“If I don’t stop and take moments like this for myself, they will never take shape.”

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