Nervous and excited, the readers were ready to take a risk and be vulnerable in a public space by allowing their work to be seen and heard in a new way. Remarkably, the 7 was on time and no track work was being done that weekend. When we stepped onto the train at 2:02 pm, there were about a dozen people in the car. As we started the reading, I announced to the unwitting passengers that we were not asking for money—we only wanted to offer some poems about Queens as we rode through it.
Some call the 7 train the “International Express,” since its Queens line runs from hyper-gentrified Long Island City—the first stop in the borough—through the heavily immigrant enclaves of Sunnyside, Woodside, Jackson Heights, East Elmhurst, and Corona before reaching its terminus in Flushing, the site of New York City’s first Chinatown. The train serves communities from the Philippines, Ireland, India, Bangladesh, Tibet, Mexico, Columbia, El Salvador, China, and many other countries.
“That’s it,” Stroud told me, gesturing to the place he planned to die. It was a good spot — the crest of a grassy hill, surrounded by an ancient forest of towering trees, with a clear view of the wooded valley rolling beyond. Nearby, a creek sang over the moss and rocks, and the mountains rose green and silent in the Oregon sky.
“You know, there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end,” he mused, looking out over the valley. “And if you live the middle part right, the end is not so tragic.”
Over the course of his 71 years, Ramey “Coach” Stroud has striven to live the middle part right.
Broadly, two criteria qualify an event as an act of God: 1) No human agency could have stopped the event, and 2) no human agency could have exercised due care to prevent or avoid the event’s effects. In other words, acts of God must be unpredictable, and their damage must be unpreventable. On that basis alone, the act of God is nearly obsolete, or at least it should be. While specific weather events such as hurricanes or fires may seem to be acts of God, our growing knowledge of climate systems challenges any vision of weather divorced from human activity. Humans meddle with the climate, which meddles with weather, and the two can’t be disentangled.
But legislators haven’t yet caught on. They’re stuck with a centuries-old precedent built on outdated understandings of nature. While no one person can be held legally responsible for causing a specific hurricane, it’s just wrong to say that weather events are uncaused or unpreventable by human activity—aka human agency. We can’t prevent all weather, but human action could have prevented the cataclysmic droughts, fires, and floods that lurk in the near future. The public now knows who triggers the growing spate of hurricanes, floods, and extinctions, and it is not God. Scientists have been warning the public about human-caused climate change for decades. In fact, the act of God’s obsolescence is just one symptom of a deeper disease. Our legal and intellectual frameworks have not kept pace with our understanding of the climate.
The book is undeniably bold, original, and deeply impressive in its investigation of the desire for greatness, along with the need to escape one’s background in order to arrive at some higher experience that seems just out of reach, during a specific time in recent history. We see each character’s purity as well as his or her biases. Psychological depth mixes quite nicely with Greenland’s pace-driven novel of multiple narratives.
A modern collection of vegetarian comfort-food recipes, the book details the lineage of the invisible contributions of African women, and the savvy meal refinement of their descendants, self-reliant and creative West Indians who innovated the region’s most beloved foodstuffs.
Without question, he has once again written a valuable book, reflective as well as jarring, concerning the most violent and enduring conflict in American history.
You keep turning up in my dreams
like a penny, worth less than the old,