Project MUSE®: Sewanee Review - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/367
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Sewanee Review.daily12026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 115 (2007) through current issueLatest Articles: Sewanee ReviewTWOProject MUSE®Sewanee Review1934-421X0037-3052Latest articles in Sewanee Review. Feed provided by Project MUSE®To Be the Singing Bloodmeal: The Work of Beauty
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988900
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Once I learned the name resurrection lily, I saw them everywhere.If you’ve never seen one, it’s a lily whose flowers bloom in late summer—its leaves sprout in the spring and then die off soon after. When it blooms, later, without those leaves, the resurrection lily is a long, thin stalk and then, suddenly, at the top, a shock of pale pink. Just when it seems the shades of summer will fade into those of fall, this lily appears again as if by magic. Now, I wonder how I didn’t notice them before; even without the flowers, they were there, along the driveway, there lining our backyard fence. But without the spectacle, the flash, they remained hidden to me. And then, if I’m giving in to the reverie of daydreaming
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/367/image/coversmallTo Be the Singing Bloodmeal: The Work of Beauty2026-04-23text/htmlen-USTo Be the Singing Bloodmeal: The Work of Beauty2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®284822026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Berlin
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988901
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Patrick’s Berlin was not mine. He’d moved there just after the fall of the Wall, had chosen to live in a squat in East Berlin instead of accepting a graduate scholarship to Princeton. He rode his bicycle east to west, crawled through holes in the Wall to visit a girl, attended free university. Wherever he went, he returned unscathed. Patrick belonged in Berlin more than he did at a place like Princeton: he preferred cities with fractured and tortured histories, which, post-ruin, accepted or tolerated outsiders—though I don’t think he ever phrased it that way. Jerusalem, where we lived together for two years, was like Berlin, with its east and west, and there was a much larger, longer wall. But Jerusalem is hot and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/367/image/coversmallBerlin2026-04-23text/htmlen-USBerlin2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®440492026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Dairy
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988903
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On the farm, it felt like I never slept. Which was fine, somehow: I was seventeen. But I must have now and then. Bruce would come get me from my room while it was still dark, and we’d milk the cows until dawn came or they were done. Usually both. For breakfast we had steak and eggs. Venison and eggs. Raw milk. Coffee. Donuts. There was always fencing that needed moving or fixing. Sometimes fixing just to move, or moving just to fix. And of course, the cows needed milking again. We stayed busy. Bruce and Chris were old and slow moving. They’d been married and living on the farm for forty or fifty years—milking cows, making cheese, slaughtering cows, selling beef, growing pumpkins, moving fences. The summer before I
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/367/image/coversmallDairy2026-04-23text/htmlen-USDairy2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®269682026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Accurate Witness
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988904
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On Saturday, Betsy went to Brooklyn to pick up her grandson, Cyrus. Once a month she took him uptown to the museum, where she’d been working as a docent for more than twenty years. Her son Jamie and his wife rented a brick row house in what he’d told her was an up-and-coming neighborhood. The house’s tall, mullioned windows were painted a cream color that showed the soot, and the front steps were cracked and coated with yellow pollen. Nasrin had planted a spindly redbud—a few dark pink blossoms clung to the silver bark—in the small front garden. Next door was a copy of the house, but more run-down, the mortar crumbling around the bricks, with a blue-and-white plaster Virgin sitting out front inside a vaulted
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/367/image/coversmallAccurate Witness2026-04-23text/htmlen-USAccurate Witness2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®456232026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23The Area of Disturbance
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988905
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In 1969, the Peabody Coal Company began to strip-mine a 5,400-acre wedge shaped like the state of Texas not far from where we live. Its northern boundary was Brouillett’s Creek near State Road 163. Its southern boundary was U.S. 150, where it passes through Libertyville, Shirkieville, and New Goshen, small Indiana towns that served the underground mining industry for a hundred years. Its eastern boundary was State Road 63, near Universal. Its western boundary was the Illinois/Indiana state line, except for a small, adjacent strip two miles north of our home in East Central Illinois.The strip mine, like our farm, sits under the eastern edge of the Mississippi flyway. Beginning in November, hundreds of thousands of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/367/image/coversmallThe Area of Disturbance2026-04-23text/htmlen-USThe Area of Disturbance2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®245642026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23An Interview with Miriam Toews
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988906
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Miriam Toews was raised in Steinbach, Manitoba, a small Mennonite town that has served as an inspiration for much of her fiction. Her semi-autobiographical break-out novel, A Complicated Kindness (2004), chronicles the life of Nomi Nickel, a disaffected Mennonite teenager raised in a similar setting. Her 2018 novel, Women Talking, drew inspiration from the story of a series of rapes of women and girls in a Bolivian Mennonite community.Though Toews is known primarily as an interpreter and critic of Mennonite culture, her work has more vital through line: nearly all of her books explore the ramifications of suicide. Her father Melvin, a schoolteacher who suffered from bipolar disorder, took his own life in 1998, as
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/367/image/coversmallAn Interview with Miriam Toews2026-04-23text/htmlen-USAn Interview with Miriam Toews2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®412402026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Kelvinator
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988908
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It is 1995 when she looks out the kitchen window and sees it in the pasture. Heaps of old bromegrass mark the skeletons of abandoned machines. Duane ought to have hauled it off, but the refrigerator where it happened is still there, peeling and cracking and hunkering yet, slumped between a stack of tractor-tire rims and the rusted tines of a four-wheel hay rake. Several decades of brome and bindweed have wound over that hay rake, have gone shatter-white in winter and thatch come spring. Seedlings sprout there in a wet year and desiccate every summer: a ruthless clockwork. Her hands work the greasy rim of a ceramic crock in the sink. She turns it and turns it in the suds.Lavannah had a girl and two boys, and it was
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/367/image/coversmallKelvinator2026-04-23text/htmlen-USKelvinator2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®315802026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Each Breath: Art & Remembrance
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988909
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This essay had its genesis twenty-three years ago when I was introduced to the work of the Cuban-American artist Félix González-Torres. More than any other artist, González-Torres got me thinking about how art most effectively memorializes the dead, especially those who died in epidemics (from AIDS, in his own work). In early 2025, having thought this essay done, the bulk of it written during the COVID-19 pandemic, I added a section after inheriting two pastel artworks by a relative who died of tuberculosis in 1922, at age twenty. As I was doing so, USAID was abruptly dismantled, including its programs for the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases around the world, HIV and TB prominently among them. This
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/367/image/coversmallEach Breath: Art & Remembrance2026-04-23text/htmlen-USEach Breath: Art & Remembrance2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®213692026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Niagara Falls
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988910
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Before Evelyn, I met Vernon.Vernon needed a videographer and found my ad on a freelancer website. The gig wasn’t strictly legal, so he paid me in advance—a maneuver, he explained, he had developed as a former cocaine dealer. He would get a text from a customer with their address and the amount they were willing to pay, and if the address ended with an apartment number, a ½, or a letter, he would show up with a vacuum in the back of his truck. For a house call, he came pushing a lawnmower. He’d vacuum the customer’s carpet or mow their lawn, take their money, and hand them a baggie.He told me all this the first and only time we met face-to-face. “Cops can get you for possession, but not for selling. That money was
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/367/image/coversmallNiagara Falls2026-04-23text/htmlen-USNiagara Falls2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®240282026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23The Best Actress in the World: On The 55th Anniversary of Alan J. Pakula’s Klute
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988911
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In 1957, a young girl, not yet twenty, traveled with her father and his fourth wife from Poughkeepsie, New York, to the French Riviera, near the fishing town of Villefranche-sur-Mer. Before departing, she completed her music history exam at Vassar by covering the test booklet with drawings of women screaming. When the dean urged her to retake the test, she promptly dropped out. She was mildly depressed, with a sense that there was always a party going on elsewhere. She was not fluent in French, though that would come later. She had no idea what she wanted to do with her financially coddled but emotionally empty life.Since her father was an actor of some prominence and her stepmother an Italian baroness, the villa
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/367/image/coversmallThe Best Actress in the World: On The 55th Anniversary of Alan J. Pakula’s Klute2026-04-23text/htmlen-USThe Best Actress in the World: On The 55th Anniversary of Alan J. Pakula’s Klute2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®211812026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Acoustic Architecture: on Gerard Manley Hopkins and Gwendolyn Brooks
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988913
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I first grew interested in poetry in my high school senior English class. My teacher, Mrs. H, spent the first few weeks of the course on poetry. I remember reading things like John Donne’s Holy Sonnets and T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” before moving on to two poets whose work I’d follow—reading their poems, biographies, articles, and what scraps I could find at my little evangelical school’s library—up until today.It may be a bit of post-fact origin-invention, but, to me now, I look back on those poets—Gerard Manley Hopkins and Gwendolyn Brooks, and the two poems we read, Hopkins’s “God’s Grandeur” and Brooks’s “The Bean Eaters”—as tied together. A feeling of two distinct but equally present sonic worlds precedes
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/367/image/coversmallAcoustic Architecture: on Gerard Manley Hopkins and Gwendolyn Brooks2026-04-23text/htmlen-USAcoustic Architecture: on Gerard Manley Hopkins and Gwendolyn Brooks2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®430512026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23