Recent events in Minneapolis have demonstrated the by-now-obvious entrenchment of American Christianity in the nation’s fascist movement. Demonstrators at Cities Church were right to see David Easterwood — simultaneously a […]
Nicholas Dolan
Posted inBook Reviews
Book Review: ‘13 Notes from Napoleon, Iowa: Musings on the Edge of the French Empire’ by Anna Barker
For several years, University of Iowa literature professor Anna Barker has produced a steady blizzard of commentary on classic French literature: Hugo, Stendahl, Dumas, Balzac. In her debut book, 13 […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Plain Spoken: More than 40 million pigs are slaughtered in Iowa annually. This author has a word for that.
Are the hills of Iowa enmeshed with a vast network of death camps, comparable in moral terms to those of the Holocaust? This is one of the questions raised, indeed […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Plain Spoken: How the Planned Parenthood Book Sale made me the man I am today
My mother and I love each other dearly and we are both capable Christmas gift-givers. Ceramic chicken knick-knacks or matching salt and pepper shakers never fail to bring a gleam to Mom’s keen antiquer’s eye, brightening the tree’s particolored twinkles already refracted in her gaze.
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Plain Spoken: The accidental poetry of Chuck Grassley’s Twitter
You could make a decent argument that the most experimental poetry coming out of Iowa for the past 15 years had nothing to do with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Plain Spoken: This ever-evolving American anthem recalls Iowa’s abolitionist glory days
In keeping with tradition, one dramatic beat of the presidential inauguration in January was the Naval Academy Glee Club’s performance of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” While it was […]
Posted inBook Reviews
Plain Spoken: Casual lust and barbaric violence mingle in the minds of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s narrators
Horacio Castellanos Moya is one of the writers Iowa City is luckiest to have. He was born in Honduras but raised in El Salvador, where he lived and worked for many years—in addition to Mexico City, his address during the Salvadoran civil war of the 1980s—as a journalist and influential newspaper editor.
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Move over, Oppenheimer: Barbie meets Gilgamesh in this University of Iowa business class
These days, the summer of 2023 feels like it was 4,000 years ago, but actually, it was less than two. If you need hard evidence of this, go check your closet. There is a significant chance you will find the hot-pink pantsuit or suit jacket you wore to the Barbie screening that July (followed perhaps by Oppenheimer).
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Plain Spoken: Iowa’s conservative despots police the power of song-flight in this 1979 sci-fi fantasia
When you crack open a ’70s sci-fi/fantasy paperback like On Wings of Song, you expect to slip into a world wholly unlike your own. For an Iowan living through Inauguration […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Plain Spoken: Listening to ‘God’s Trombones’ (1927), a tribute to Black preaching with Midwest origins
Today’s readers tend to associate poetry with the intense evocation of an individual speaker’s thoughts and feelings. Poems are short, usually no more than a few pages. They entail the cultivation of a distinct poetic “voice.” They put language to the otherwise private domain of the poet’s mental life. In doing so, they forge a personal connection between poet and reader.
Posted inBook Reviews
Book Review: ‘Brazos’ by Justin Carter
This January, while visiting Tulsa with a friend, I made an effort to reconnect with my redneck roots. We went firing at an indoor gun range. Across the street was […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Plain Spoken: Revisiting ‘Iowa,’ Patrick Moore’s neglected gay novel
This monthly column will explore the long and diverse history of literature’s Midwestern engagements. There is an established canon of American literature in which the Midwest plays heavily, as a both physical and social place.
