Put Off My Sackcloth: Essays is a mosaic of essays about one writer's journey through a life fraught with crippling interior darkness in an uncertain world to the salve she finds in her "shored-up ruins" and new maternal life beneath the lambent glow of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range in South-Central Colorado. The daughter of a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany and an American mother prone to suicidal depression, Annie Dawid, in these essays, traces the history of her life, pivoting between the hanging trees of her most despairing moments, the fouettés of her youth, her archetypal dig into the horrific mass suicides of Jonestown, and the aching "architectural wonders" of her beloved son, Elijah. After her father's death, Dawid finds in the wording of his will a "code" that sends her on a search for a new and better life. Dawid's rich and gratifying intellect, her cultural and political insights are enmeshed with the decisive moments of her life that lead her into emotional maelstroms and, at times, psychological bankruptcy. And yet throughout these essays, we never lose sight of Dawid's compassionate, empathetic embrace of all those she encounters who stand on fragile shores. As part of this journey, place looms large as an important character in the book. Sackcloth shines with the rural Colorado community of ranchers and artists who share with Dawid a sprawling valley of scattered coyote and spiraling constellations. Here, always, reigns the generosity of spirit, the life lesson shared, the simple hope carved out of this high mountain meadow land where Dawid lives with her son in an off-grid cabin amid cattle troughs and windmills and old pioneer tubs she fills with wildflower seed. Put Off My Sackcloth is an unblinking look at the life of one woman-daughter, mother, artist, scholar-who sought change and ultimately found illumination.

Put Off My Sackcloth: Essays

Biographies & Memoirs

Dawid, Annie

Arts & Literature

The Humble Essayist Press

Soul-Error explores the ways in which, stubbornly yet creatively, we go through life misreading ourselves and our world. Heraclites claimed, long ago, that no one steps in the same river twice. Reprising that riddle, Soul-Error explores how our lives, kaleidoscopically, take on new contours, abandoning old ones. soul We are resourceful actors moving through time and space; we span them both as we enact our evolving identity. No less, space and time span and play us in return. Soul-Error attempts to take the measure of this double-edged play.

Soul-Error

Weinstein, Philip

Parenting & Relationships

Remembering the Alchemists is an intense, passionate, and moving collection of personal essays that never loses sight of the moral issues it raises. At times thoughtful and wise and at other times a cri de c?ur, it is held together by the experienced voice of an essayist at the top of his game. Richard Hoffman speaks softly, even reverently, in the presence of art and the natural world, but addressing militarism, war, and violence against children, he speaks with urgency and earnest questioning. Several of these essays ask how it is that we seem to have given up on ourselves, and what it might take to turn the cascading traumas of history into compassion for one another and lessons for the future. In this award-winning poet's fourth book of prose, sentences can open into reverie or stop you in your tracks. Whether he is writing about a painting, the work of another writer, a tree that grew in front of his boyhood home, the atrocities visited upon children, the superstructure of exploitation and oppression, or the responsibility to be a "good ancestor," Hoffman pleads with us to move beyond familiar tropes and assumptions and relinquish a learned despondency that ensures a future of more wars, ongoing injustice, and stifled potential. He transforms personal experience not into "the universal," that categorical abstraction, but into the public, the civic, the ethically useful. These seventeen essays aspire to do more than diagnose our current malaise; they attempt to lift us from it, to clarify our situation, to encourage and inspire. Although Hoffman's candor can at times be shocking, the beauty, intelligence, and bracing clarity of his vision challenges readers to meet the demands of our historical moment with confidence. Insisting that no conclusions are foregone, Remembering the Alchemists is ultimately a book about what it means to hope, to have faith, to see clearly and still insist on joy.

Remembering the Alchemists & Other Essays

History

Hoffman, Richard

Americas

Sydney Lea's Such Dancing as We Can is a compendium of one man's ponderings on the events and changes in this world over the course of eighty-one years. Lea has devoted the greater part of those years to poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, but this collection of essays makes clear that other matters-chiefly devotion to wife, children, grandchildren, and a handful of devoted friends and relations-are at very least as important as his art. More accurately, the essays often indicate that without these other affections and bonds, his art would be at best impoverished and more likely nonexistent. Lea's deep knowledge of his beloved northern New England woods plays an essential role in Such Dancing As We Can, but there are other motifs as well. His long-term delight in blues, country and western, rock n roll, and what the late Rahsaan Roland Kirk called Black Classical Music (especially the work of late bop composers and performers like Thelonious Monk, Max Roach, Miles Davis and others) informs many of his observations. The book finds genius and inspiration among people and in quarters that many of the nation's elite wouldn't tend to explore. Lea frequently meditates on the issues of race, American exceptionalism, class, privilege, and inequity through his own personal experiences and the experiences of those he has encountered over the last four decades. This is a book written by the hand of a poet, its language often beautifully lyrical and studded by stunning imagery and contemplative metaphor. It is through the poet's heart that we follow Lea's journey into the mysteries of grace and the small blessings bestowed upon even the humblest life. Lea's gratitude for the life and affections that have been granted to him makes us aware of our own and we share in his humility as he searches through his writing to understand the unknowable and its gifts, which reveal themselves to us through quiet contemplation.

Such Dancing As We Can

Lea, Sydney

Memoirs

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