Thomas Hubbard reviews Priscilla Long's Dancing with the Muse in Old Age

How old are you? Do you know somebody just half your age? Do you trust your own knowledge, your experience, yourjudgment, more than you trust that younger person’s? For your sake, let's hope so. Priscilla Long's new book, Dancing with the Muse in Old Age, delivers a litany of examples, anecdotes and statistics giving us good reason to view all ages through this same principle.

Despite most positions of ultimate responsibility in business and government being occupied by older adults, ageism pervades most of our culture. Note how many of us twist our language every which way to avoid calling ourselves orour associates old. In the introduction to her book, Long notes “Some [of us] insist that the word elderly and elders isrespectful, whereas the word old is not. Others make up terms, such as olders…”

Finally, in business the truth comes on the bottom line. If “NEW” on the packaging of soap, breakfast cereal or patent medicine is expected to increase sales, it becomes obvious that a large segment of the population holds a negative view of old. Priscilla Long is working to change that.

Thomas Hubbard reviews Larry Crist's "Alibi for the Scapegoat"

We all want to be understood. It’s a basic human need, transcending differences of race, geography, sexual orientation, even religion or lack thereof. We want people to understand why we do what we do, why we love those we love, why we make the decisions we make, why we are the way we are. Unconsciously or deliberately, we manage our appearance, our speech, information we include or exclude, and our actions of the moment, in order to shape how others understand us . . . and to provide an alibi for any aspect they might find unseemly. Larry Crist’s new collection of autobiographical poems and short stories, Alibi for the Scapegoat, exemplifies pursuit of this human need most eloquently. His conversationally-acerbic writing style fits the reality in which he grew up.

Thomas Hubbard reviews Jed Myers' "Watching the Perseids"

My stepfather wept often during Mum’s last year. Fear and shock shone from way back in her eyes, behind the blank stare. Her knowledge of who and where she was had already left. Dementia had stolen her brain, and after a final year of total helplessness, she passed — Mom was gone and it was finished. Dementia took her away from us, then killed her, and her long dying deeply scarred both my stepfather and myself.

If only Jed Myers’ book, Watching the Perseids, could have come fifteen years ago, the pain could have been far more bearable.

book reviewsSarah SalcedoJune 25, 2016thomas hubbard, Watching the Perseids, jed myers, book reviews

Thomas Hubbard reviews Jeanetta C. Mish's "What I Learned at the War"

As a child who spent countless days in company of a river — swimming, catching crawdads, fishing, trapping muskrats, hunting rabbits — I learned how to cut small, tinder-dry grapevine twigs and smoke them like cigarettes, exhaling the mild smoke to drive away clouds of river gnats. And so when I opened Jeanetta Calhoun Mish’s What I Learned at the War for the first time and read the lede stanza of her “Pastoral for My Brother,” I was immediately hooked. She wrote,

Today, I remember
prowling the woods with you
smashing wild grapes
into our haunted mouths,
smoking the vines.

Reading on, I discovered a writer whose work evokes the America that birthed “new” southerners, urban mixed-blood NDNs, midwest greasers, and the legions of lost travelers who, like Kerouac in the fifties, cross the continent endlessly, searching for their lives. This collection of poems displays a distinctive attitude, established most succinctly in the poem, “Sometimes there was an armistice.”

Thomas Hubbard reviews Chris Jarmick's NOT ALOUD

Do you read or write poetry in Seattle? Have you ever read or written poetry in Seattle? Columbia City? Kirkland? Are you familiar with the term, Poem Starter? You do? You have? You are?

Then you must know Chris Jarmick.

Book Reviews