Essays
The Wind on Mors Island
Last year, at age 90, Knud Sørensen put out his fourteenth poetry collection to go along with his 35 other works of biography, novels, short stories, essays, and memoir. After…
The Date (redux)
In her essay “The Date,” Brenda Miller talks about the photos we hang on our refrigerators, photos of ourselves with those we love. We originally hang them to remind ourselves…
Vision as palimpsest: on Johannes Göransson’s translations of Ann Jäderlund
Translations emit. They pull us in and push at us at once. Emit, that curious word: it’s time spelt backward. Translation makes time go backward. Translation’s process … helps me…
Despotism is all around us: the warnings of Montesquieu
It is commonplace for citizens of liberal, democratic nations to believe that despotism is foreign to their own experiences. Their political constitutions display in some form or other a separation…
Noli me tangere
In 1939, as London braced itself for the bombs, the National Gallery’s paintings were moved to the dining room of Penrhyn Castle, North Wales. It wasn’t necessarily safer. Martin Davies,…
Shields: A poem founds the world it finds
Editor’s note: The following essay is excerpted from Of Silence and Song, a book of essays, fragments, and poems forthcoming from Milkweed Editions (December 2017). Reading Hesiod on the shuttle bus to the…
Love song por La Condesa
On the night of September 19, 2017, I find a small map online of the oval park in front of my father’s house with its surrounding streets that extend out…
The authority to say anything at all
When I was a Catholic teenager, I was an altar server and reader at my parish church. Our parish priest was forward-thinking. At one Easter Vigil Mass, I played the…
Letter from Issue 50 guest editor Ricco Siasoco
The collective “I” in Issue 50 of The Critical Flame is one of protest, of comedy, and, hopefully, of the zeitgeist. As the guest editor for this issue, I’ve attempted…