Darin Cozzens’s second collection, The Last Blessing of J. Guyman LeGrand and Other Stories, contains Emus and Mormon spinsters, ill-fated wedding ceremonies and wheelchair races in the dementia ward, washtub nostalgia and the ambiguous values…
In his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot writes that tradition “cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.”This has always underscored for me the importance of knowing your literary tradition, of reading widely and deeply, and of exposing yourself to a variety of great voices. In many ways the work I did in graduate school was a clunky attempt to cultivate what Eliot calls “the historical sense,” an awareness of tradition that “compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones” but with “the whole of the literature of Europe” and “the whole of the literature of his own country” in his mind as well.
Morning 3, Nankoweap Camp Across the river, she sees a big brown lump shamble over to the water’s edge. She wants it to be graceful, sleek, to glide through the water, not lumber like a…
My sadness eats sauerkraut because she’s allergic to sauerkraut.
My sadness roams heating ducts, shuffling through the lint. My sadness sharpens her teeth.
My sadness starts the avalanche she gets caught in. Then I can’t breathe.
Three of her children were taken:
one whispered
out of life by a flapping heart,
I had walked
a few steps
of chalk cold
asphalt toward
The young African boy stumbles over the Supper of the Lord’s words—
in the Promised Land: a new gospel.
The man in the dark suit signals, again.
Again. And yet again, while we in the pews squirm.
Dialogue 49.3 (Fall 2016): 151–155
Shiffler-Olsen turns Joseph Smtih’s first-person First Vision accounts into poetry.
Every afternoon when I pick my children up from school the teacher who acts as a crossing guard calls out, “Hello, Mrs. Harding!” I return his large, friendly smile and call back, “Hello, Mr.—!” Occasionally the encounter is elongated by a sentence or two about how brilliant my child is or how much she enjoys his English class. On the whole, it is a pleasant exchange. But my name is not Mrs. Harding. It never has been. Not even when I was married.
The famous couplet coined by Lorenzo Snow in 1840, “As man now is, God once was: As God now is, man may be,”rears its head every now and then, inspiring both awe and some confusion among rank-and-file Latter-day Saints while causing at least a degree of discomfort for Church leaders and spokespeople who are trying to make Mormonism more palatable for our mainstream Christian friends and critics. Some observers have even suggested that the Church is intentionally downplaying this doctrine.Nevertheless, the couplet found its way into the 2013 Melchizedek Priesthood/Relief Society manual Teaching of Presidents of the Church: Lorenzo Snow, and this distinctive doctrine also appeared prominently in previous manuals containing the teachings of Brigham Young and Joseph Smith.