Anyone who’s seen the play or film Amadeus will remember the scene where Mozart has debuted his new opera for Emperor Joseph and his palace gang. The emperor tells Mozart (I’m paraphrasing) that it was a good effort, and showed promise and talent, but that it had — […]
I am a different kind of lover of truth now Since his death in 2011, Edwin Parker ‘Cy’ Twombly, Jr. has emerged as a key figure of 20th-century art, even as many of his contemporaries and followers have fallen behind. Ironic confirmation of his importance comes from […]
Jeri Parker once said that she built her summer cabin on family land in Idaho, but it never registered that she meant this literally: hammer in hand, from floorboards to ceiling joists. She even dug in the waterline. And in her captivating new memoir, My Seasons of Wilderness, the Salt […]
David Lee, the first Poet Laureate of Utah and a retired professor of English literature, has published over 20 books of poetry, two of which have been nominated for a Pulitzer and one for the National Book Award. His newest collection of poetry, Mine Tailings, is a dynamic […]
“Nothing gets to stay what it is for very long,” says Cori A. Winrock, describing the transience of the world that surrounds us, just one of the many themes addressed in her new book of lyrical poetry Little Envelope of Earth Conditions. “Heirlooms, spacesuits, an ambulance; objects are […]
In Terry Tempest Williams’ astonishing and lyrical When Women Were Birds (2012), the first several pages after the introduction are blank to enact for the reader the three shelves of blank journals Williams’s Mormon mother bequeathed to her — an empty journal for every year she was expected […]
“I’ve got a lot to do. That’s what keeps me around,” says Jeff Metcalf, who has been in a battle with cancer for the past 18 years, with many ups and downs during that time. He possesses a sense of purpose and determination that very few of us […]
The poems in Maximilian Werner’s collection Cold Blessings seem to come from another time, when the only screen we had was television and our conversations were held either in person or by phone; when we spent time loafing and inviting our souls. Remember what it was like to […]
Li-Young Lee, in a recent interview, describes a spiritual practice as “fundamentally orienting, compass-like, pointing the soul toward its primary source,” and that placing any other thing — politics, for instance — at the heart of the matter “must lead eventually to confusion … a form of dis-orientation.” […]
Inside the Animal, Shanan Ballam’s latest poetry collection, is subtitled “The Collected Red Riding Hood Poems” and encompasses some of her 2010 chapbook The Red Riding Hood Papers. Only some — a number of poems from the earlier work have been dropped as the poet has sharpened her focus, and new […]
Educated is a marvel of a book, somehow thoroughly spirit-lifting despite being a fractured fairy tale of Beauty and the Beasts with dark purple bruises and broken bones and shattered hearts and minds and no real happily ever after for our Beauty; just life as we live it, […]
In what may be the keystone essay of his 2018 collection, The Bone Pile: Essays on Nature and Culture, Maximilian Werner asks a crucial question: “What is the purpose of listening?” The essay is entitled “Environmentalist,” and it is a musing on the unfortunate labeling that adheres to this […]
There’s an impending sense of madness in Janalyn Guo’s collection of short stories Our Colony Beyond the City of Ruins. The quick movement between each story, and between imagery and action within each, feels at times like the manic switching of cable box channels or the incessant swiping […]
In the tiny pioneer outpost of Vernon, Utah in the West Desert south of Tooele author John Bennion was born and raised. Little has changed there since the time this fiction writer and professor of English at Brigham Young University lived there in the ’40s and ’50 and […]
If you’ve ever said to yourself, “I wish Faulkner had lived and anxiously dreamed and feverously wrote his visions from the Utah/Mountain/Desert / Mormon/West” (instead of the South) then Before Us Like a Land of Dreams (Torrey House Press) by Karin Anderson is what you’ve been waiting for. Trailing a […]
