‘All of time is cut in two’

‘All of time is cut in two’

And After All by Rhina P. Espaillat. Able Muse Press, 2019. Paperback, 130 pages, $20. Reviewed by Midge Goldberg “Without you,” Rhina Espaillat says, “all of time is cut in two.” The best poems in Espaillat’s new book, And After All, are about grief. Espaillat lost...
Narrating the Future

Narrating the Future

Looming Civil War: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Imagined the Future By Jason Phillips. Oxford University Press, 2018. Hardcover, 320 pages, $35. Reviewed by Carl Lawrence Paulus “What is past is prologue.” William Shakespeare’s line from The Tempest is inscribed...
On the Endlessness of the World Story

On the Endlessness of the World Story

By James V. Schall, S. J. In The Tolkien Reader is found his famous essay “On Fairy-Stories.” At the end of the essay, we find some explanatory “Notes” listed according to letters—A, B, C, and so on. The Note listed as “H” is the one that interests me here. Note “H”...