Furnace of this World; Or, 36 Observations about Goodness

Nick Ripatrazone is the author of Longing for an Absent God: Faith and Doubt in Great American Fiction (Fortress Press, 2020). He has written for Rolling Stone, GQ, The Atlantic, the Paris Review, and The Sewanee Review. He is the culture editor of Image Journal.

Nick Ripatrazone

Goodness Is a Triumph: On Ed Simon’s “Furnace of this World; Or, 36 Observations about Goodness”

"You always admire what you really don't understand."
— Blaise Pascal

Religion

"The older one grows, the more one likes indecency." — Virginia Woolf

Memoir &amp; Essay

We Can Be Heroes: The Winter Poetry Olympics Part II: The Not-So Secret Puck: Women’s Ice Hockey and Don DeLillo’s "Amazons"

<h4>Michael Heald is the author of Goodbye to the Nervous Apprehension, a collection of essays. He lives in Portland, OR, where he runs the small press Perfect Day Publishing. </h4>

Michael Heald

<h4>ALISON STINE&nbsp;is the author of&nbsp;Wait, winner of the Brittingham Prize (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), and&nbsp;Ohio Violence, winner of the Vassar Miller (University of North Texas Press, 2009). A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and a recipient of the Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, her first book of essays,&nbsp;The Last Hotel, has been a finalist in the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. </h4>

Alison Stine

<h4>P. Scott Cunningham is a poet. You can follow him <a href="https://twitter.com/cunningpscott">@cunningpscott</a>.</h4>

P. Scott Cunningham

<h4>Lynn Melnick’s first collection of poetry, If I Should Say I Have Hope, was published by YesYes Books in 2012.</h4>

Lynn Melnick

<h4>Jake Adam York was an award-winning American poet. He published three books of poetry: Murder Ballads (2005), selected by Jane Satterfield for the Fifth Annual Elixir Press Awards Judge&rsquo;s Prize; A Murmuration of Starlings (2008), which was selected by Cathy Song for the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry and won the 2008 Colorado Book Award in Poetry; and Persons Unknown (2010), an editor&rsquo;s selection in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry; as well as a work of literary history, The Architecture of Address: The Monument and Public Speech in American Poetry, published by Routledge in 2005. York was an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Colorado Denver, where he directed an undergraduate Creative Writing program and produced the literary journal Copper Nickel with his students and colleagues.</h4>

Jake Adam York

Deborah Paredez is the author of the poetry volumes, Year of the Dog and This Side of Skin, and the critical study, Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory. She is a Co-Founder of CantoMundo, a national organization for Latinx poets. She lives in New York City where she teaches creative writing and ethnic studies at Columbia University.

Deborah Paredez

<h4>Sarah Blake lives outside of Philadelphia with her husband and son. She is the author of Mr. West, an unauthorized lyric biography of Kanye West, forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press in Spring 2015. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, The Threepenny Review, The Awl, and elsewhere. She was awarded an NEA fellowship for poetry in 2013, and she’s Assistant Editor at Saturnalia Books and co-founder of Submittrs.</h4>

Sarah Blake

<h4>PATRICK ROSAL&nbsp;is the author of three full-length poetry&nbsp;collections, Boneshepherds, My American Kundiman, and Uprock Headspin&nbsp;Scramble and Dive. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous&nbsp;journals and anthologies, including Tin House, American Poetry Review,&nbsp;Harvard Review, Drunken Boat, and Language for a New Century. He haswon, among other honors, a Fulbright Fellowship, the Association of&nbsp;Asian American Studies Book Award, the Global Filipino Literary Award,&nbsp;and the Asian American Writers&rsquo; Workshop Members&rsquo; Choice Award. He is&nbsp;a member of the Creative Writing faculty at Rutgers University-Camden.</h4>

Patrick Rosal

<h4>Lytton Smith is Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Plymouth University. He is the author of a book of poems, The All-Purpose Magical Tent, and two translated novels from the Icelandic.</h4>

Lytton Smith

We Can Be Heroes: Poetry at the XXX Olympiad (Part 7)

Nick Ripatrazone is the author of Longing for an Absent God: Faith and Doubt in Great American Fiction (Fortress Press, 2020). He has written for Rolling Stone, GQ, The Atlantic, the Paris Review, and The Sewanee Review. He is the culture editor of Image Journal.