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.

Red Letter Poem #318

 Red Letter Poem #318

 

 

 

 

 

In the Dream, My Right Breast Returns to Me

 

 

assuming I’ll recognize it at the door,

saying we’ve both been wronged.

There’s no purgatory for what’s been cut out.

Or heaven. Yet sometimes it senses a welcoming

back when I stand in front of a mirror,

cup my right hand above my ribs,

imitate symmetry, the new way

I’d carry myself, stand.

 

There’s no need to say anything.

No need to say close call, my friend.

It asks about my mother, how she’s doing,

remembers how she once told me every morning

I wake up and it’s there staring at me—

her daughter’s biopsied killing machine—

and I couldn’t tell her to stop

because it was always there staring at me too.

 

I answer she died of old age—

something very few do these days.

Now, disguised as an angel, she rolls dice,

drops bombs on evil, carries the dead

to large medical waste containers

that will hold them until every war ends,

until they can be returned to their fields.

And sometimes, there’s a faint scent

 

accompanying this work, an unfamiliar

souring breeze passing over rotting apples—

because there is no end to searching out

each first bad, each first diseased.

My breast tells me that’s too dense an analogy, 

though other lost limbs have commented

that she could be a saintly jellyfish

in a sea of suffering.  And that’s quite

 

amazing, I say, because my prosthetic

resembles a jellyfish too.  My breast and I

chuckle for a moment, then grow silent. 

We both realize I won’t invite it in. 

I can’t live wondering if it’s an imposter. 

And once I’m told I can’t live by holding

onto something, I let go—see—like this,

my hand—open, empty.

 

 

                                     ––Dzvinia Orlowsky

 

 

 

 

 

 

If the subject matter of today’s poem was just too painful, I trust the title warned you away.  But those readers who persisted got the chance to experience something that’s increasingly rare in contemporary poetry: an act of imaginative courage.  Daring invention, emotional intensity, oases of quiet observation––these are everywhere in the journals, and I’m so grateful for them.  But a poem where the psychical ante is this high––where such radical nakedness is a requisite for the language to do its work––that is a much more unique experience.  Though she’s an acclaimed poet, Dzvinia Orlowsky confessed to me how much trepidation she experienced, just showing the poem to the first outside pair of eyes: how would the world respond to such a thing?  And yet she persisted because, I believe, she was aware that such poems arrive (as dreams do) unbidden and undeniable.  No matter how painful, they are a form of gift––and the recipient has a responsibility to share that gift with any who are willing to receive it.  October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and so I saved this contribution for a time when it might find its most willing reception: from all those who’ve had to suffer through the same experience; and from all of us who have not yet had to sacrifice a piece of our very being just to survive.

 

The situation of the poem is outlandish and stunning: the speaker’s right breast, taken from her during the cancer surgery, returns like a prodigal daughter, assuming she will be recognized even after this painful estrangement.  A small gesture can serve as an ample welcome home: “when I stand in front of a mirror,/ cup my right hand above my ribs,/ imitate symmetry.”  When Dzvinia writes these lines, we, too, feel utterly exposed.  And yet, after, we cannot help but smile when the breast asks after the poet’s mother, the way a long-lost relative might.  Of course, the breast itself is the emblem of motherhood, reminding us of a force that sustains humanity even while the brutal machinery of the world grinds on.  Suddenly the poem throws open another door, and all the terrible excisions from disease and war are included in this conversation––not so surprising, perhaps, coming from a Ukrainian-American who keenly feels how much needless suffering is being inflicted on her ancestral homeland.  At that moment, I hope you performed––as I did––a little mortal inventory: what has or has not been taken from your body, your life––and when was the last time you offered gratitude for the abundance that remains?

 

It brought a kind of dark thrill to imagine this mammarial presence as “a saintly jellyfish

in a sea of suffering.”  But the poem’s response somehow prompts our hearts to both leap and falter simultaneously: “quite amazing, I say, because my prosthetic/ resembles a jellyfish too.”  Still, our protagonist declines to invite the breast into her home, to indulge in the kind of happy reunion that would undercut the honesty.  “And once I’m told I can’t live by holding/ onto something, I let go—see—like this,/ my hand—open, empty.”  And with that one quiet imperative––“see”, set apart by those em-dash-sutures––the devastating beauty of the poem has worked its spell on us.  Because in that moment, we do the one thing we were too afraid, too embarrassed to do: we see, in the mind’s eye, the poet’s body.  We imagine, for an instant, what it would be like if this happened to us, or to someone we love.  We stand there, naked, before the poem’s full-length mirror, and understand something new about our fragile embodied lives.

  

Poet, editor, and translator, Dzvinia is one of the founding editors of Four Way Books.  She’s authored seven poetry collections with Carnegie Mellon University Press, including: Bad Harvest, a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read”; and her most recent, Those Absences Now Closest, named to Brilliant Book’s ‘Most Brilliant Books of 2024,’ and a finalist for New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Motton Book Prize.  Her previous Red Letter contribution, “Шум” was awarded a Pushcart Prize and will appear in their forthcoming anthology.  Along with her co-translator Ali Kinsella, Dzvinia has carried over the works of great Ukrainian writers like Halyna Kruk, Natalka Bilotserkivets and, most recently, Oleksander Dovzhenko––and for all that, she was awarded the 2026 David Ferry and Ellen LaForge Prize in Poetry and Poetic Translation (just one of her numerous honors).  I return to the line “And once I’m told I can’t live by holding/ onto something…”––and realize that is precisely the awe-full gift of this poem: had life not already instructed us in this lesson, the poet is telling us now.  Can we, too, “let go” and extend our empty hand?  The poem welcomes this generative openness, and perhaps we can find the courage to do the same.    

 

 

 

 

The Red Letters

 

* If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your own in-box – or would like to write in with comments or submissions – send correspondence to:

steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com

 

 

* To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

 

* The weekly installment is also available at

the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

http://dougholder.blogspot.com

 

* For updates and announcements about Red Letter projects and poetry readings, please follow me on BlueSky

@stevenratiner.bsky.social

and on Twitter          

@StevenRatiner

 

And visit the Red Letter archives at: https://StevenRatiner.com/category/red-letters/