Somerville's Jessa Piaia channels Isabella Stewart Gardner for her garden projects

Recently, I caught up with Jessa Piaia about her Isabella Stewart Gardner garden project in Somerville...

How has Somerville been for you as a creative person?

Somerville is a vibrant community of artists of diverse genres.  That’s what makes this city such a great place to live, and our local Arts Council is proactive with their support of the creative climate here.  I am grateful to the Somerville Arts Council who awarded a SAC/MCC Fellowship last year for me to partner with Friends of the Somerville Community Growing Center (FCGC) for my Isabella Stewart Gardner program.  My ‘community benefit’ performance focused on Mrs. Gardner’s gardening activities, scheduled at the Community, Architecture, Landscape & Art (aka CALA) building, 1060 Broadway Ave., adjacent to Lou Ann Park in Teele Square in September 2025.  Interestingly, CALA’s structural design is akin to the Gardner Museum, in that each has a central courtyard garden, filled with plants, murals, a music space, plus (3) “green roofs,” which align with Mrs. Gardner’s ‘glass rooftop.’  Before & after my performance last year, the FCGC and Garden Club presented Somerville Pollinators for Action Plan (SPAP) materials to educate attendees on the value of cultivating native pollinator plants to support our ecosystem, in our home & community garden settings.   

This year the Somerville Arts Council awarded a project grant for us to expand the program across the community, as part of Mass Cultural Council’s “Cultural Heritage” category.  So we focused on Mrs. Gardner’s vision of bestowing annual “Garden Prizes” in Somerville. 

You are a historical reenactor. How do you choose your subjects? How do you get into character?

As a historical reenactor, I research the person’s “character,” studying their strengths and weaknesses, goals and aspirations, and what they accomplished during their lifetime.  The aspect of Isabella Gardner’s character I am most drawn to is her sense of determination against all odds. And just before opening her house-museum, Isabella collaborated with her close artist friend, Sarah Wyman Whitman to design a mythological “Phoenix shield” to hang above her Fenway Court entryway.  This shield symbolizes the challenges and risks she undertook to achieve her vision, with the steadfast, transcendent perseverance it took after the grief of losing her only child, and later when she constructed the 4th-story house-museum as a widow.  A devout Episcopalian, Isabella was a deeply spiritual person, who quietly gave sums of money to her Church of the Advent, and to the Anglican priests and nuns to help those in need.  

Despite persistent rumors of being an eccentric & strong-willed woman, the recent biography, “Chasing Beauty” by Nathalie Dykstra depicts a vivid sketch of Mrs. Gardner as a mature woman confident in her abilities and sound of judgment, who relied on her instincts when selecting “quality” art.  While facing the demands of overseeing construction of her house-museum on ‘reclaimed swampland’ along the Muddy River, she would not be deterred from realizing her vision -- that America had not yet developed an art aesthetic and culture of our own, we were still looking to Europe and Asia for our inspiration.  So this became her quest, starting with procuring the Old Masters, while sponsoring local artists & musicians.  Once the Museum was completed, she opened its doors to the public, while she resided on the 4th floor.

For many years you have presented " Isabella Stewart Gardner and her passion for horticulture." What was it about Gardner that drew you in.  Do you see anything in yourself that is similar to this eccentric, collector and patron of the arts?  

Gardening is one of my favorite pastimes, I enjoy watching a narrow strip of pollinator plants alongside my house throughout the seasons.  As a historical reenactor, I have researched and portrayed Isabella Stewart Gardner for over 30 years, and more recently I am focusing on her gardening activities.  Mrs. Gardner began cultivating the 40-acre Gardner Estate, called Green Hill, Brookline, MA, alongside her in-laws, when she arrived in Boston as a young bride in 1860, as they would win ongoing Massachusetts Horticultural Society prizes over the years.  Decades later, she and Jack inherited the Green Hill property when his parents passed.  Isabella would also cultivate a variety of plants in two Green Hill greenhouses, to display at her Fenway Court “Courtyard,” transporting them to create (6) displays throughout the seasons.  These floral arrangements were part of her “living collection” -- in contrast to the Old Masters artwork and décor she displayed throughout her house-museum.   

What drew me to portraying Mrs. Gardner is she is the “first woman in America to conceive, design, and construct a house-museum.” Collecting art was a passion she and Jack had shared, however her husband passed before their vision was realized.  So in her grief, Isabella held fast to her vision of bringing joy and uplifting beauty to others through the Art & the Flowers she arranged.   When she opened the museum to the public in 1903, she dedicated it “to the City of Boston, for the education & the enjoyment of the Public, forever.” Upon her passing, her Fenway Court house-museum was renamed The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, to signify it had been accomplished by a woman.     

Tell us a bit about your project with the Growing Center in Somerville.

The Somerville Community Growing Center is a vibrant nexus of cultural & educational programming run by a steadfast team of volunteer members – all are welcome.  Founded in 1994, their mission “Gather, Create, Experience” includes ongoing programming with live music, nature-themed films, poetry, opera, maker fairs, climate awareness performances, an annual maple boil, and the teddy bear picnic.  I am grateful to partner with Lisa Brukilacchio, urban agriculturist, co-founder on the FCGC board, and the Growing Center team.  

In June 2026, we announced the “Model Pollinator Garden Prizes,” for residents & community groups to register their "Pollinator-friendly gardens" for consideration of an award.  Over the summer local AV artist, Ami Feldman designed posters, and later drew maps connecting the Pollinator garden addresses.  We are also grateful to Mahoney’s Garden Center for their $50 donation, ie (5) gift cards.  After Labor Day, we contacted the awardees, and on October 3rd, we gathered for the culminating Ceremony at CALA, at which “Mrs. Gardner” made brief remarks for historical context, then presented the awards.   

The two categories of recognition are:  (5) home gardens:   Marion Davis (Cross St. Place, E. Somerville);  Beth Kevles & Mieke Citroen (Hancock St);   William Bennett & Jonathan Rich (Lexington St);  Rosa Carson, Mary Miratrix & Rie Macchiarolo (Broadway Ave);  Alice Lee / Jonah & Courtney Petri / Leslie Beale / Cynthia Waite & Ed Barton, ie, the (4) Highland Road neighbors who collectively cultivated a “verdant corridor” from their front porch to the curb; and Kit Cangardel (Rodgers St) received a "Certificate of Recognition" for her front yard container garden.

Also the (7) public & community gardens to receive a Certificate of Recognition include:

 (1) Native Pollinator Garden along the Community Path – maintained by Somerville Garden Club, presented to Irene Heim; 

 (2)  “The Wedding Nook” Native Pollinator Garden at Prospect Hill Tower, presented to Luisa Olivera, Director, Public Space & Urban Forestry; 

(3)  Somerville Pollinators Action Plan (SPAP) for their citywide plantings, including Lincoln Park & at CALA, presented to Alison Maurer, Planner of Ecological Restoration, who’s currently seeking volunteers for their next Pollinator planting at CALA on OCT 24. 

(4)  Green & Open Somerville has organized Pollinator plantings throughout the city, including Lowell Street ramp on the Community Path, as well as citywide depavings.  The Certificate was presented to Joel Bennett, co-founder of the Community Path on behalf of Green & Open; and Tim Lasker, Manager of Sustainability at MBTA spoke to the T's ongoing efforts of fostering community engagement.  

(5) Native Pollinator Meadow at Blessings of the Bay Park, Mystic River Watershed Assn. (the meadow, situated along the Route 93 corridor, is located on lands of the Massachusetts, Nipmuck & Pawtucket tribes).  The certificate was presented to Karl Alexander, Greenways Program Senior Manager, with Offshoots Productive Landscape whom they worked with to develop the site.

(6)  Glen Park Community Garden, a vibrant oasis in East Somerville, presented to Leeane Darrigo, Lesley Ballantyne, and Sam Musher, who shared what being part of a community garden has meant to them.  Jen Fries, also gardens here, but had a previous commitment.  

(7) The Residential Life Team at CALA, who are sharing their vision of this magnificent public space with our Community, presented to Deb Pacini & Jane Carpineto, both CALA residents.

Could you call Somerville-- a city of gardens?

Yes, definitely, we can call Somerville a “City of Gardens.”  The City’s Public Works Department manages an array of programs & activities which support the challenges of living in a densely populated urban environment, ie, nearly 5 square mile circumference.  I believe we are a vital example of Frederick Law Olmsted’s vision, through our home gardens and our public spaces, we are cultivating a 21st century “Emerald Necklace,” of flourishing “pollinator pathways” throughout Somerville. 

New England Poets in new anthology “Wag the Dog: Poems of Politics and Social Justice"

 

In Main St Rag’s blistering poetry anthology “Wag the Dog: Poems of Politics and Social Justice,” New England voices contribute to a national chorus. The collection’s greatest strength is the range of ways its poets experience political life. Along the way they confront encroaching authoritarianism, the military-industrial complex, the oligarchy and income inequality, and the erosion of access to health care, among other issues. The poems also display a warm immediacy; they move between public events and inner voices—through kitchens, medical appointments, offices, gardens, American history and personal memory. Some demand an honest appraisal of what one citizen’s vote can do in the face of this national peril, while others hint that saplings will live to outgrow the pines and oaks with their ominous institutional shadows.

Massachusetts poet Carla Schwartz, who recently won the New England Poetry Club’s Samuel Washington Allen Prize for her elegy to the late Charles Coe, told me that a local poetry group inspired her to write a political poem that remained positive. Her poem “Today I Started to Write About America” begins in uncertainty:

 

“Whose America might

I have written anyhow?”

…

“An America, with all its chest-puffing

missile-might, its misspent dotage

that brings me shame?”

 

Many of us have peered out the window on a winter day, wondering if we’re naïve to have believed in ideals, American or otherwise. In the poem, Schwartz calls forth the extended metaphor of a sapling in this winter landscape. The personified tree contains a “dormant” energy, ready to burst forth. The poet wonders what she might utter, in her “huddled” and “hunched” state:

 

“waiting to burst out

from under a heavy thumb,

to spring back

in release?”

 

Maine poet John Seksay provides a similarly striking image in his poem “Shortened Fuse” as he envisions the Statue of Liberty repulsed by America’s failure to welcome the “tired,” the “poor,” and the “huddled masses” invoked by Emma Lazarus’s poem inscribed on a plaque inside the statue’s pedestal.

 

“Lady Liberty has been quite loudly

tapping her massive copper sandal

in frustration, fists planted on her hips,

sputtering torch clenched tight in her right fist,”

 

Seksay offers this powerful thought while questioning our nation’s descent into demagoguery, having fallen for a narcissist who uses his executive office to unjustly enrich himself through digital-asset ventures.[1] By the end of the poem, Seksay imagines our national monument transformed into an exasperated woman tapping her foot and contemplating departure.

 

“When so many people fall for a scamming man

who can’t bear to see any true image of himself

then America may have completely lost its chance.

Lady Liberty just might book a boat for France.”

 

Amherst poet Gerald Yelle brings an even darker absurdity to the fore, shining a light on the institutional drudgery that trickles into our day-to-day lives. “I think it’s important to protest against the current regime,” he told me. Although typically leery of themed anthologies, he had poems that fit. His “Mapped to a Tractor Beam Shadow,” originally inspired by Gandhi and The Jewel in the Crown, found relevance.

The poem stages an argument between a museum patron and a docent over a disappointing display and the politics of its funding. Neither quite emerges innocent from the exchange, and there is a sense that their opposition is arbitrary. The patron’s generosity carries the threat of control; the docent knowingly makes a false accusation. In sophist fashion to make Gorgias blush, he trusts repetition to make it stick:

“He knows if he says it

over and over at the right

volume with just the right pitch

and intonation she’s bound to believe.”

 

In Yelle’s “They Said Resistance Was Futile,” the poet effortlessly enacts a state of political acquiescence:

 

“It seemed

waiting was the right thing to do when

the shooting stopped, but then our neighbors

started disappearing. The people in charge kept

changing the subject. We kept hoping

they’d declare victory and leave us alone.”

 

New Hampshire native Veronica Tucker’s poems “County Line” and “Narcan Weather” paint scenes that demonstrate what happens when institutional priorities envelop human concerns. The opening line of the former communicates so much: “The map still shows a hospital here.” But “No camera crew arrives,” the poet relays, as the community loses vital services:

 

Each year another service disappears

the way shoreline disappears

one storm at a time.

 

            In the poignant “Narcan Weather,” Tucker shows how trauma can hang over daily life even on a day when nothing out of the ordinary happens. We see this in the naloxone a grandmother carries in her purse next to peppermints, a rosary, and a boy’s photograph. As the medication expires, she waves to neighbors and waters tomatoes because ordinary routines must coexist with her fears; at their best they may soothe them.

 

            Cambridge’s Scott Ruescher often finds inspiration through traveling. In “At the Dockery Plantation,” he tells of an essential pilgrimage to one of the places where the roots of modern popular music took hold. He explained:

“My contribution to Wag the Dog, “At the Dockery Plantation,” is one of many poems I’ve set in the American South. A few new ones, this one included, are set at sites along the Blues Trail in Mississippi. The Dockery Plantation, as my poem suggests, was the home and workplace of several well-known blues musicians during the Jim Crow days—musical artists whose work informed the creations of most of the white musicians I grew up listening to, from the Gershwins to the Rolling Stones. In writing poems about Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Bessie Smith, and others, I guess I’m apologizing for the financial exploitation—but I still love to listen to Bob Dylan adapt the rhythm and blues to his Beat surrealism.”

Ruescher’s lyrical lines have a cascading internal music, a trademark of his style:

 

I tried to hear them crooning from a century or so away---

medleys of Delta reveries about the effort to make a buck,

…

Their friends were dancing barefoot in the grass, or lounging

by moonlight on blankets, exorcising the demons

their forebears hadn’t known how to offer their freedom,

swilling from jars a corn whiskey that might have made

a mule smile, redeemed by the blues, happy in a different way

than they’d be singing gospel in the church the next day.

 

Here is working-class resilience personified. African-American laborers living under Jim Crow helped create the musical language through which generations continue to express themselves. These laborers’ achievement brings me back to Schwartz’s sapling and its latent power beneath a “heavy thumb.” This is the inherent force that, if our country has any chance to live up to Lady Liberty’s ideals, we must see nurtured to its full expression.

           

            What makes this anthology special is the dynamic range of voices and experiences. In these pages you’ll find a poem lamenting American taxpayers’ complicity in the genocidal destruction of Gaza alongside a professor’s testimony that a group of protestors had yelled “Go back to Europe!” outside her classroom window, directing their prejudice at any Jewish person within earshot. I don’t consider myself a proponent of the idea of “required reading,” but I’ll say this: put Wag the Dog (Main St Rag, 2026) in a time capsule and you’ll give future generations a fantastic snapshot of life in America circa the 2026 midterms. Or, just read it now as we’re living it.

 

New England Poets’ Recommendations:

 

Carla Schwartz

From Wag the Dog: Malaika King Albrecht’s “Palestine Sunbird”; Tina Barry’s “Words Disappear Too.”

Recommended reading: Wendy Drexler’s Harvest of What Remains.

Gerald Yelle

From Wag the Dog: Malaika King Albrecht’s “May You Live”; Dia Calhoun’s “A Bestiary of Wind: The State of the Union February 2024”; M. Scott Douglass’s “More Faith in the System Than I Have”; Kristin Laurel’s “Don’t Play Dead.”

Recommended reading: An untitled manuscript by Ernie Brill, author of Journeys of Voices and Choices.

John Seksay

Recommended reading: Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Renascence.”

Scott Ruescher

From Wag the Dog: Jan Beatty’s “Dropping Blotter Acid at the Slag Dump”; Linda Culp Holmes’s “Legacy”; Jeannine Marie Pitas’s “Work”; Janette Schafer’s “Driving Home”; Tony Medina’s “American Sonnet for Renee Nicole Good”; Jason Youngclaus’s “Never Poets.”

Recommended reading: Roque Dalton’s Las Historias Prohibidas del Pulgarcito.

Jason Youngclaus

Recommended reading: Philip Levine, “Names of the Lost.”

 

Jason Youngclaus is the author of Little Planet Raisins (Spartan Press/Luchador, 2020). His recent poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Burningword Literary Journal, JMWW, Anti-Heroin Chic, Pictura Journal, The Argyle Literary Magazine, and Jerry Jazz Musician, among others, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives in New England’s Merrimack Valley. His poem “Never Poets” also appears in Wag the Dog.

jasonyoungclaus.com | Instagram: @jyc_music_lyrics

---

[1] Trump reports over $1.4 billion in income from crypto ventures | Reuters

A Coffin Heavy with Questions: On Elizabeth S. Wolf's Parenting in the Age of Columbine

A Coffin Heavy with Questions: On Elizabeth S. Wolf's Parenting in the Age of Columbine (Kelsay Books, December 2025, 94 pages, $20)


https://kelsaybooks.com/products/parenting-in-the-age-of-columbine?_pos=1&_sid=59b5d3f79&_ss=r


by José Enrique Medina


Parenting in the Age of Columbine, by Elizabeth S. Wolf, is strongest not at the level of individual poems but at the level of book design. Many poetry collections feel assembled; this one feels built. Organized around Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, and Uvalde, the collection follows the speaker's daughter from birth through young adulthood, allowing the reader to experience the history of school shootings through the intimate lens of motherhood. The result is a collection animated by a compelling question: what does it mean to raise a child in America after Columbine?





Wolf's greatest strength is her ability to connect public tragedy with private experience. In poems such as "Parenting in the Dark," "Sammy Island," "18 and Overseas," and "When the Phone Rings," national violence is not treated as an abstract political issue but as something that quietly enters kitchens, parking lots, doctor's offices, and family relationships. The book's most moving moments occur when the ordinary anxieties of parenting collide with the extraordinary reality of a country shaped by recurring mass shootings. In "18 and Overseas," when someone asks whether her daughter is safe while traveling abroad, the speaker responds with one of the collection's sharpest observations:


do you think she is safe here?



freckle-faced boys
with AR-15s
American as apple pie.





Another strength is Wolf's resistance to easy answers. Rather than reducing complex events to villains and victims, she repeatedly asks difficult questions about responsibility, grief, warning signs, and the limits of parental knowledge. Poems such as "Wayne Harris" and "Dylan's Mother Susan Klebold Gives a TED Talk" explore parental love alongside uncertainty and regret. The collection's most unsettling poem may be "Ben, We Hardly Knew Ye," which follows a teenage friend fascinated by Columbine who dies by suicide at fifteen. What makes the poem so heartbreaking is its restraint. Amid discussions of school shootings, self-harm, and warning signs, Wolf focuses on ordinary details that become devastating in retrospect. After Ben calls the speaker's daughter shortly before harming himself, the call goes unanswered. Wolf's response is painfully simple: "Sometimes even kids miss calls." Elsewhere, the poem reveals how information remains hidden, as children often keep painful truths from adults. The speaker learns only later that Ben had been dubbing "metallic music with reverberating screams" over Columbine security footage, while her daughter had concealed other troubling details, including that Ben had created a Facebook page as Eric Harris. These omissions suggest not parental neglect but the tragic reality that children often keep secrets from the adults who love them most. Ironically, the impulse to protect those adults can deepen the very isolation that makes tragedy possible. The poem also gestures toward the splintering effects of identity in the digital age, where young people can create alternate selves that drift further and further from those around them. Yet Wolf refuses to force these details into a tidy explanation. Instead, she leaves readers with the unforgettable image of "Six sophomore boys carri[ing] a coffin heavy with questions."


The collection's extensive research never calcifies into documentation. Wolf's notes section reveals a deep engagement with the subject, yet the poems themselves stay porous—open to doubt, to tenderness, to the particular. In "When the Phone Rings," a daughter's call home becomes a stay against the collection's accumulated fear: she describes how "there were clouds reflected in the glass / of the Hancock building, like the blue sky / was both solid as a tower and as / gossamer as hope." By this point in the book, hope isn't a sentiment—it's something the speaker has had to fight to keep.



What Wolf has made is not a chronicle but a reckoning—with the country, with motherhood, and with the specific texture of loving someone in a place that keeps failing to protect them. Beneath its examination of violence, grief, and uncertainty lies a quieter, more enduring question: how do you keep raising a child toward a future you're no longer sure you can promise?

José Enrique Medina is a queer Chicano poet, playwright, novelist, and literary critic. His debut poetry collection, Only the Dead Let Me Talk This Much, won the 2026 Lambda Literary J. Michael Samuel Prize. His chapbook Haunt Me won the 2025 Rattle Chapbook Prize. His work has appeared in USA Today Hispanic Living Magazine, Los Angeles Review, Best Microfiction 2019, and elsewhere. A PEN America Emerging Voices fellow, he is the founder of the Chickens & Poetry Residency for Writers. Connect with him on Instagram @MedinaWrites or at MedinaWrites.com.

*** This review was previously published by  Your Impossible Voice  

Eden by Jon D. Lee

Jon D. Lee is the author of five books, including IN/DESIDERATO and An Epidemic of Rumors: How Stories Shape Our Perceptions of Disease, as well as the chapbook Eden. His poems and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Narrative, Sugar House Review, Sierra Nevada Review, The Writer's Chronicle, One, The Laurel Review, and The Inflectionist Review. He has an MFA in Poetry and a PhD in Folklore. Lee teaches at Suffolk University, where he also serves as the Director of the annual David Ferry and Ellen LaForge Prize for Poetry and Poetic Translation.

I spoke to Lee about about his latest poetry release, "Eden"

This long poem is a long discussion with John Milton, of " Paradise Lost" fame. Milton wrote of morality and free will. You wrote "We eat our gods" in this collection. Does our free will lead us here?



An interesting question: does human freedom lead us to the point where we consume our own gods? If we accept Yuval Noah Harari’s arguments (especially in Sapiens) that religions are, in essence, a “fiction”—that is, a construct in the same class as money and government and law that would cease to exist alongside the destruction of humanity—then we certainly move toward a reality wherein those religions become consumable products in multiple senses: not only in their use and usefulness, but in their ability to be swallowed and either incorporated into a body or excreted. Consider all of the religions that are effectively extinct—Mithraism, Zoroastrian Polytheism, Manichaeism, etc.—which certainly evince a shifting world in which gods fade or are replaced as society progresses, or as countries are subsumed beneath warring factions. If you will, what we then often have in history is one group’s “freedom” being taken by another: “I am free to worship my god, but you are not free to worship yours.” At the same time, at least in parts of the modern world, we have the freedom to question the existence of religions and gods in ways that were never previously acceptable, and so we have tomes such as Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, which collectively argue a radical atheism, and so it is perhaps not surprising that a recent Gallup poll found that the percentage of U.S. citizens who said religion was an important part of their daily life dropped from 66% in 2015 to only 49% in 2025. I am not, in Eden, arguing the existence or nonexistence of God, but I do find it curious how our cultural understandings and tolerances of religion have changed over the centuries, and find it especially telling that Milton was contemporaneous to Descartes, whose moving philosophy from blind adherence to individual reason is credited by some as shifting the importance of reality and thought away from the church (despite Descartes’ attempts to philosophically argue the existence of God), and leading to the rise of modern atheism via Nietzsche et al.





Why did you decide to focus on " Paradise Lost"? There are many other works you could have chosen.



Eden is actually only one of several “discussion” poems I’ve been working on for several years. The first of these pieces was my long poem “Las Meninas” (Sugar House Review, vol. 24, 2022), which argued the nature of art and perception with Diego Velásquez (and that poem only part of a manuscript-in-progress which argues the nature of modern poetry with John Ashbery, my “Las Meninas” being a direct response to his long poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”). Eden is the second of these, and is actually in itself only a portion of a larger manuscript-in-progress titled The Labyrinth. I am also at work on a third manuscript which converses with John Berryman (using the structure of his Dream Songs poems) about alcoholism, depression, suicide, and the world that rose up both poetically and politically after his death. There is, in other words, a history of these choices, Milton coming in specifically here because a) my father was a Milton scholar and so I grew up absorbing his ideas through a sort of osmosis, b) Milton allowed me to move into a rough beginning science/religion polarity that I found interesting in its tensions, and c) I’ve spent the last ten years of my writing life focusing almost exclusively on the long poem, Paradise Lost being the supreme example of that form.



The book reminds me of Dan Tobin's " The Mansions" in that it is steeped in myth, religion, literature, a very scholarly work. I asked Tobin, and I ask you, do you feel this more of an academic book, and or will it appeal to the casual reader?



I had not read Tobin’s The Mansions, but it arrived over the weekend and I read the first canticle over this morning’s coffee, and the parallels are indeed aptly noticed. We even circle around many of the same questions and time periods and locations, though Eden does not delve as deeply into the realms of quantum physics. Both of our works are what the late Reginald Shepherd would have likely classified as “difficult,” but I think both of them avoid what he warned against as being “obscure” in that Tobin and I attempt to provide enough information for the reader to understand context, direction, tone, etc. Certainly both books are assisted by supplemental reading on the part of the reader, as well as access to a dictionary, but I believe a large amount of pleasure can be derived from this activity.



As to your specific question, I think both books are intended to be studied, and in that sense are certainly “academic” for a given definition of that word—meaning to be parsed slowly and carefully—but enough care has been taken in the structure and editing of the works that they should be approachable by a decently-read poetic audience, if we accept Whitman’s declaration that “To have great poets there must be great audiences too.”



At the beginning of the book you quote from " Paradise Lost," " Oh friends why not come on these victories proud?" I think you capture the existential questions that face you, and all of humanity. Your take?



I’ve certainly attempted to look at as many existential questions as I thought would comfortably and reasonably fit into the poem. In this sense, Eden actually nicely follows the directions from my previous book, IN/DESIDERATO, which I wrote as a letter to my children about the world we’re leaving behind for them to inhabit, which is increasingly tenuous in its environmental stability even as medicine geometrically opens the possibilities of drastically increased lifespans, and the dissonance between those two realities is terrifying in its obvious shortsightedness. But whereas IN/DESIDERATO was much more focused on an environmental ethic, Eden moves into war, politics, capitalism, patriarchal hierarchies, and other modern issues to question our directions and intentions.



Why should we read this collection?



The poet Kevin Prufer tells us that a poem maps the movement of a mind across the page, and in following the movements of my mind throughout this book, you will learn something about how I experience this world as a father, a husband, and a member of our shared society. Anything we can do to better understand ourselves and each other helps move us towards a more open and caring society. That's the society in which I want my children to live.

Somerville artist Stephanie Richardson: explores how the divine and mundane exist together.

  

Photo Credit: Molly Tomlinson

Somerville artist Stephanie Richardson writes:


"I'm a visual artist and former costume designer. My formal training began in the '90s when I earned a master's degree in costume design for theatre from Brandeis, but I stepped away from art to support my family. Over time, I pursued an MBA and built a career in higher ed administration. What brought me back to making art was the need to process and respond to this ever-darkening political moment. Making art—whether protest posters or paintings—became essential to my own resilience. Now, I'm in what I'd call my creative renaissance, finally with the time and energy to do the work I've always wanted to do."




How is it for you as an artist to live in Somerville? I saw that you commented on the housing crisis in the city. Do you see a time when you might be forced to leave the city?


I've been fortunate. I had access to family resources that allowed me to buy a home here, which has been a gift I don't take lightly. For years, I served on the board of the Somerville Community Corporation, which builds affordable housing for low-income families. That work opened my eyes to how precarious housing is for so many in our community.
Would I be forced to leave if I didn't own my home? Probably. The city I moved to 30 years ago has changed dramatically due to [universal] economic policies that reward the wealthy and punish the poor. I think about this often. This said, I truly appreciate this community—the friends I've raised my child with, the relationships I've built, and the other artists whose life experiences are teaching me new things about myself every day. That sense of belonging matters as much as the physical space.






You talk about your exploration in your work of the feminine divine and the day-to-day reality of our lives. Please explain?

I was recently in Spain and saw something that stopped me: images of the Madonna in every corner—on cathedral walls, in storefronts, next to advertisements and graffiti. Right there alongside people doing ordinary things—buying groceries, walking their dogs, living their lives.

That juxtaposition sparked something in me. We live in a world that feels fractured. On one hand, we hunger for meaning and something sacred. On the other, we're just trying to get through our days. I'm interested in that collision—how the divine and the mundane exist together, not separate.

Many of us have complicated relationships with religion and spirituality, but we're still searching for belonging, for reassurance that there's something watching over us, something that believes in us. My work tries to express that: there's encouragement and belonging available to you, even now, especially now.


Some of your work is political. Who do you count as role models. Offhand --I can think of Picasso's Guernica, and the murals of Diego Rivera, and the work of Frieda Kahlo—do any of these ring a bell for you?


Art is always political—it's about what we choose to see and show others. My work is absolutely political. I create protest posters—drawing on WWII anti-Nazi propaganda, the bold graphic language of Mucha and Lichtenstein—and I bring them to rallies and marches. It feels essential to put art directly into the streets in service of what I believe in.

I was fortunate to see Frida Kahlo's work in person at the Tate last summer, and it was transformative. Her unflinching honesty about pain, class, and the socialism of the period speaks to me deeply. I also love Diego Rivera's murals—that commitment to making art for and about people, not just for galleries. Someday, I hope to make murals of my own; we certainly have enough bare walls in this city...


Tell us about the Athena Project you are involved with.

We just launched this on the bike path in Somerville during Honk!, and it's been extraordinary.

The Athena Project is a participatory art installation where Somerville residents put on a custom costume—helmet, shield, chiton, cape—and step in front of a camera. But here's what makes it different: before you're photographed, we give you a prompt card. On it is a question designed to help you name something you're carrying—a challenge at work, a struggle in your relationships, something weighing on your heart.

The idea is that when you step in front of the camera, don't escape from that weight. Instead, you transform how you see yourself meeting it. See yourself standing in your power with clarity and courage. That's what we photograph—not imagined capabilities, but your actual capacity to bring strength and wisdom to the problems that affect you and your community. You leave with a portrait that reminds you that you already are that person.

We're a collective of local artists—neighbors and friends with expertise in costume, photography, lighting, fabric work, and painting. We want to host a number of these events, and eventually generate a community portrait of resilience and courage in a moment when so many of us feel exhausted and uncertain.




Why should we view your work?

Because right now, people are grieving. People are afraid. And what we need isn't false reassurance or escape—we need to remember what we already carry inside us.

My work is an invitation to see that. To see the divine in yourself and your neighbors. To remember that you have wisdom and strength; that the universe wants you to succeed, even when the world feels like it's on fire. And then to take that knowing into your relationships, your family, your community, where it matters most.

 

Bad Energy by Joshua Frank.

 

Bad Energy by Joshua Frank. Haymarket Books, Chicago, Illinois. 2026.

Review by Ed Meek

One of the problems of the attempts to fight climate change concerns the divisiveness within the movement. Dealing with the environment is complicated. There are groups like the Sierra Club that focus on nature, rain forests and rewilding, groups like The World Wildlife Fund that prioritize animals, birds, whales, fish, and coral reefs. Indigenous people and their allies want to preserve sacred grounds, tribal lands and natural habitats. Engineers see the climate crises as an energy problem that can be solved with technology. There are anti-nuclear groups and anti-ocean-turbine groups. It might even be worse than the Democratic Party.

Scientist Saul Griffith says all we need to do is electrify. Bill McKibben, (350.org) eternal optimist, argues we need to transition to green energy and we can still do it. Malm and Carton in The Long Heat and Overshoot say we must focus on mitigation because climate change is past the point of stopping it. Naomi Klein claims capitalism is at the root of the problem and we must scale back our lifestyles. Saito and others argue for “degrowth” because, they say, capitalism is unsustainable.

In Bad Energy, Frank writes a chapter each on different aspects of the climate change movement: precious metals, solar farms, wind turbines, water resources, nuclear power and the ocean. Frank claims that Trump, big oil and AI are intent on using the green energy moment to make money from the mining of precious metals like lithium and copper needed to make electric vehicles, batteries, wind turbines and solar panels. This results in open pit mines, ruining beautiful areas, and exploiting native workers in Africa, the American southwest, Bolivia and elsewhere. Frank is also against solar farms that harm the biodiversity of an area and encroach on indigenous scared grounds.

This stance while principled kind of paints Frank into a corner. Solar panels, the fastest growing source of energy in the world is ok with Frank if the panels sit on big box stores and peoples’ houses (except when they have to be replaced and thrown away).

Frank points to Trump’s interest in Greenland being about the precious metals there. But Trump also wants to take over the western hemisphere, control trade routes that would make use of Greenland’s location, build up a military presence there to counter Russia and China, and take charge of all that real estate that will open up due to global warming. Although Trump calls green energy a scam, he obviously believes in climate change. His focus on fossil fuels is all about money.

Bad Energy often seems to argue against green energy, dismissing EVs as an elitist non-solution powered by lithium. “Yes, we can still prevent the apocalypse, but we’ll never do so by driving a Tesla.” Well, no but, transportation is responsible for about 25% of global warming. And combustion engines are terribly inefficient sending 75% of that gas into the air where EV’s convert 90% of the electrical energy to power a car. And electric cars are a first step, eventually all transportation can be electrified. Although lithium batteries aren’t great, they will be replaced by solid state batteries in the next few years.

A chapter on water resources and dams delves into the growing problem of water scarcity. “More than half of the world’s rivers and two-thirds of its lakes are drying up…” As a result, governments are turning to dams to capture the water they need to survive. In addition, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, recommends dams to provide hydro-electricity. But the water is disappearing from global warming! And dams are causing conflicts between countries, as well as displacing local peoples.

Frank is also skeptical about nuclear power. Can we really trust those people? And mining the ocean for precious metals wrecks the ocean eco-systems.

Bad Energy is very well-researched. Frank backs up his claims but he’s a little fuzzy on where we go from here, how we prevent the apocalypse or how we solve the problems stemming from climate change. His strength is in stating what is wrong with our current approach. One unstated thesis of Bad Energy might be that we need to regulate the transition to green energy. We certainly cannot rely on Big Oil or corrupt politicians like Trump to solve the problem.

Joshua Frank in Bad Energy has aligned with those against capitalism and on the side of indigenous people. He would agree with Thoreau who said we must “Simplify! Simplify! Simplify! Frank’s skepticism is not far away from Elizabeth Kolbert’s who exposes the unintended consequences of various projects in Under a White Sky. The title refers to sending particles into the air to block the sun to mitigate global warming. What could go wrong? Frank would also find common ground in Vaclav Smil who explains in How the World Really Works just how complex the problem of climate change is due to our extensive dependence on fossil fuels. Although Frank doesn’t have solutions to all of the problems he brings up, he gives the reader plenty to consider as we continue to destabilize with our fragile eco-system.

Flashback Friday to Red Letter #205

Flashback Friday to Red Letter #205

 

We Know

The time will come, we know, when one of us,

catching a summer chill,

takes on the fulltime, lifelong chore of being ill;

or something sidesteps all that fuss,

some blow we won’t have leisure to discuss—

one absent-minded footfall on a hill,

or too close to a cougar’s kill.

Soon or late, one will prove the obvious.



The other, paperwork and speeches done, will come

home to the thought of home, wanting a drink,

a kiss, not to be there another year or twenty.

In that too spacious minimum,

at least for a time there will be time to think

back over plenty.





––Charles O. Hartman





In her essay "Disruption, Hesitation, Silence," Louise Glück wrote: “I do not think that more information always makes a richer poem. I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary.” It seems to me that Charles O. Hartman has taken her suggestion to heart. He has crafted here an elegant, if painfully reticent, sonnet; but the reason for the poem, the constituents of that hovering “we”, and the fearful apprehension that is propelling this speaker’s train of thought––little of this is addressed outright. The artfulness of the piece serves to both reassure and undermine the reader, all at once––which, to my mind, is a fitting response to the precarious moment being contemplated. Though the poem commences with a line in iambic pentameter (and certainly the meditation beginning to unfold does call to mind the sort of discourse Shakespeare relished), its rhythms then become more unpredictable; we find ourselves on a stormier sea. And while the poem steadies us with the regularity of its stately rhyme scheme, the barometer of unseen forces is plunging and I can’t help feeling that, at any moment, our little boat could capsize. “It is analogous to the unseen for example,” Glück went on to say, “to the power of ruins, to works of art either damaged or incomplete. Such works inevitably allude to larger contexts; they haunt because they are not whole, though wholeness is implied: another time, a world in which they were whole. . .”. I imagine the late great poet smiling as her fellow-practitioners, like Charles, go on inventing new ways of approaching that emotional whirlwind, establishing that core silence within their poems.



It's been some time since Charles’ New & Selected Poems (Ahsahta Press) made its appearance; and perhaps you, as I, have been waiting for a new collection from this wonderfully-adept, musically-inventive poet. Having previously featured poems in the Letters from his manuscript-in-progress, I was delighted that Downfall of the Straight Line, his eighth poetry collection, finally made its debut from Arrowsmith Press. Because of the poet’s nuanced style––conjuring much more in our minds than the poem ever specifies––I look forward to engaging with each new text. And how many provocative phrases are echoing inside today’s poem! I literally feel swept away by the cascade of l’s, by the fragile iambic heartbeat that returns with: “the fulltime, lifelong chore of being ill”. And how adroitly he avoids a head-on reckoning with that most devastating of fears: sudden loss of the beloved––“or something sidesteps all that fuss,/ some blow we won’t have leisure to discuss”. To love someone deeply is to know that, sometime along the hazy path ahead, one of you will be forced to mourn the other––“to prove the obvious”: that our mortality is far more than a literary device, and this fate makes no exceptions. “We know”, the poem tells us––but do we really, or do we tend to engage in intellectual conceits and artful gestures to blunt the force of that knowledge? And then, as if it were simply unbearable to contemplate the death itself, our protagonist skips right away to the aftermath of the funeral, coming home to an empty apartment, buffering sorrow perhaps with a drink, not yet prepared to allow reality to sink in.



Just now, after stopping to read the poem yet again, I felt compelled to set language aside––to stand and simply look out at the day. And there: my wife, on her hands and knees, out back in the garden, planting alstroemeria. The utter pleasure visible on her face; her hands caked with dirt––as she’s done with abandon since she was a girl. And when I return to the keyboard, to Charles’ lovely bruise of a poem, this is what I am experiencing: an elegy for the plenitude we, too often, only comprehend in hindsight. A great bell has been struck––not within the borders of the piece but somewhere outside it, somewhere in the speaker’s life we are not privy to in this reserved and well-appointed sonnet. We are taken though, by the waves of reverberations as they slowly fade, until only a deep ache remains.