Friday Links
May 22, 2026
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St. Rita of Cascia, Italian School
Frost Farm Prize Winner Announced
As of Fire: Poets and Pentecost
Sam Kahn: How I Learned to Read Again
Stories That Show the Examined Life Is Very Much Worth Living
Frost Farm Prize Winner Announced
Congratulations to Carla Galdo on being awarded this year’s Frost Farm Prize for Metrical Poetry. You can read the poem and judge Ryan Wilson’s comments on the poem HERE.
As of Fire: Poets and Pentecost
This new chapbook from Bainbridge Press will be released on May 24, but you can pre-order a copy now. There’s an extraordinary lineup of poets in this book. I am honored and humbled to be in their company. This is a fantastic anthology and Bainbridge Press and Tamara and Ben Rockwood are to be commended for putting it together:
Forty-two poets answered a call I sent out when Pentecost was still a long way off. They wrote toward fire, toward voice, toward the body in the middle of becoming, toward the moment a stranger becomes witness. Their poems arrived in many languages: formal and free, devotional and not, ancient in their forms and very much of this moment. I read them the way I once read my father’s book of edible plants, looking for what would feed us, what was safe, what was bitter but nourishing. I arranged them in four movements (Voice, Fire, Body, Witness), the four threads that ran through the call and through the responses.
Sam Kahn: How I Learned to Read Again
From a more macro point of view, what was happening at this time was the final breakdown of a Bourdieauian concept of social status, in which taste was the critical metric of status and being bourgeois or refined meant, among other things, being a reader (for a glimpse of how a Bourdieuian social system worked in practice, it’s worth watching certain movies from the ’70s or ’80s, any Woody Allen movie, for instance, which are basically a cornucopia of high-brow referents). As David Brooks nicely documents in Bobos in Paradise, the bourgeoisie made a kind of collective pact around the 1990s or 2000s to just drop it—to not burden themselves with showing off how much they’d read and to instead just flaunt their wealth while entertaining themselves with talking about TV shows, which were starting to become pretty good.
Stories That Show the Examined Life Is Very Much Worth Living
The male perspective is a consistent feature. Set in various domestic spheres in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, the stories collectively, though not linearly, cover the natural span of a man’s life. Scouts appear more than once in these stories, as do the Minnesota Twins. The Vikings make a strong showing in the tragicomic “Cold Is a State of Mind.” Other characters show propensities for music and the fine arts. Though there are no female protagonists, mothers play a steady role as a kind of compass, directing their sons toward virtue and holiness. It is one boy’s mother who takes him to church for confession twice a year, another’s mom who taught him not to pray for bad things to happen to those who hurt him.
