The Myth of the Missing Welcome

The Napa Valley Register reported a June 28, 2016, program to honor Viet Nam veterans at the Lincoln Theater in Yountville, an event sponsored by the Veterans Home of California. I am always glad to see veterans of different generations and their families get together. But the article title suggests that the event perpetuated a … Read more

Review: Leviathan

If you appreciate dark foreign films, speaking thematically, you get it all in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan (2014): the sense of fatalism, quixotic determination fueled by indignation and vodka, the mockery of people hoping that this time the system will work for them, the self-destructiveness of resistance, misogyny, the insecurity of daily life, rapacious governments, collaborationist … Read more

Review: Uncontested Grounds by William Conelly

These are fine, subtle, graceful, insightful poems, rich in imagery and insight. I’ve been reading them over and over for a month without tiring. Some of these poems are worth the price of the book by themselves, like “Intuition,” which seems to me to be one of the finest examples of dramatic irony since Robert … Read more