PAUL CHRISTENSEN

Very gradually, almost like an illusion, the heat waves that rolled over Vermont and scorched the roofs, and left us wilted like old hospital flowers, has given way to an almost mystifying solace of mild weather, with lots of short rains and cool mornings. I was expecting much worse. I was ready to suffer and to think of the weather as part of the dark curse that has settled over us in the last stages of Trump's administration. He boils with rage, he shouts, he insults, he bl

For years I told my writing classes that the reason South American poetry was so unpredictable line by line is because of the political upheavals most southern countries experienced since the Spanish Conquest. You can't read a Neruda poem without sensing the political earthquake shaking the mind and pulling apart ordinary logic until it crumbled into sudden revelations of magic. The same, of course, with magic realism, and its defiance of all the conventions of English-langua