Sonia Greenfield: “Sometimes you read something in the news, and it begs to be a poem. I mean … as if a McDonald’s meal with a prize could make an adult, like, for-real happy? It’s useful to consider, as Zadie Smith did, the difference between pleasure and joy. No doubt an adult Happy Meal would provide me with a moment of pleasure.” (web)
Sonia Greenfield: “This poem is an acrostic that borrows the title of the well-known Emily Dickinson poem, as I have been thinking about hope lately. How it buoys us, and how it lets us down. Yet, without it, why do anything?” (web)
Sonia Greenfield: “Like many others, I was flabbergasted to hear that Rush Limbaugh received the Medal of Freedom. He received it, I assume, because he’s dying. I then imagined how he would be received by prior recipients, and that’s how this poem came about. I don’t particularly believe in heaven, but it’s a pretty fantasy.” (web)
Sonia Greenfield: “It’s always a shock to hear of someone’s suicide—in this case, Bourdain’s. We always want to know why, as if some sort of knowing would make sense of it; however, suicide is such a deeply personal choice, and most deeply personal choices can’t be made sense of even with the people we’re close to. I know many of us have thought of it, which makes Bourdain’s death feel a little more intimate.” (web)
Sonia Greenfield: “In the news this week were several stories about North Korea’s missiles and nuclear aspirations. One wonders whether such stories are meant to elicit fear with their doomsday scenarios or whether they are meant to inform us of a true threat. Either way, the rest of us, the citizens in our homes—presumably in either country—are just trying to keep our children alive.” (web)
Sonia Greenfield: “When I read of the ‘Ghost Ship’ fire in Oakland at the artists’ warehouse, and I read of the individuals who were lost in the fire, I realized how much those people were like me twenty years ago, trying to make it in the Bay Area, in love with life on my own and the creativity and melodrama of being young in the city. Besides the years between us—the then and now—the only thing that separates them from me is chance: my luck and their misfortune. It’s a terrible story and too true in terms of how fate works.” (website)