The history of Taoism is not clear-cut, nor is Taoism easily defined; however, it is widely accepted that Taoism originated in China as a blend of psychology and philosophy and later emerged as a religion in the first or fourth century... Read More

“Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue. But if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines.” (Hamlet, III, ii, 1) These are Hamlet’s initial... Read More

Next to the Marines, the New York Yankees are the epitome of “the few and the proud.” Throughout their major league existence—more precisely since they “stole” Babe Ruth from the Boston Red Sox in 1920—the Yankees have been... Read More

“Love, what we’ve lived through together / has not killed us yet” are the words of a woman who has lived raw and close to death. The author, a long time AIDS educator, also weathered the trauma of her partner’s organ failure and... Read More

As the title advertises, this new book is not itself a poem but the footnotes to one that the author insists exists only as “a text that its unnamed author could only fractionally complete.” Since T. S. Eliot added his famous... Read More

“Of all the musical forms to emerge during the twentieth century,” writes the author, “jazz was by far the most significant.” The author lends support to this statement by writing extensively and intelligently about jazz from its... Read More

“Approximately 12 percent of the population in this country lives in poverty, totaling about 32 million Americans.” One in five young people lives without access to life’s basic necessities like sufficient food, rent, or health... Read More

The necessary kindling is what ignites, and in the title poem it begins this way: “when she awakens, / she remembers / the shape of her own breath, / pressing it / into the heart of her words.” So, like all first words, this... Read More