Mr. Bottum is the author of eight books, including An Anxious Age and The…
The Middle Ages produced songs whose lines shifted effortlessly between the vernacular and Latin, almost as if the two were not separate languages at all, but one.
A high-wire act that somehow balances childish sensibility with adult competence at verse.
The central conceit is a common weed: Queen-Anne’s Lace, a wild carrot that escaped from colonial transplants of European origin, blooming today in delicate profusion across all the temperate zones of America.
This is how grown-ups sound when they are intelligent, clever, and well aware of both the human comedy and the human tragedy that measure our distance from the eternal truths.
In the brief halcyon moment before the advent of Robert Burns and his wee, sleekit, cowrin’, tim’rous beastie, James Thomson was the Scots poet of the eighteenth century.
The Midwest is central to any understanding of the American story, yet it has been dismissed for over a century as dull, stultifying, and soul-killing.
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