ALL POETS ARE THIEVES!!!

Apologies, Tempest Titans, for a week's absence from this column, post, whatever designation for this form seems apt: I have been quietly dynamiting mountains of undergraduate essays and now that the mountains are gone, I can once again look out onto the tempests at sea.

I teach a Contemporary Literature class at my college and this morning we had an extraordinary guest, author Leni Zumas. Her debut collection, FAREWELL NAVIGATOR (Open City) is an exhilarating romp through the psychic and physical landscapes of delinquents, witches, and troubled souls, at times painful, sometimes comic, and always beautiful and poignant. I am all for old time religious rituals and to see a class of technology and engineering students being converted en masse to storytelling has me shouting "Amen." Zumas is a young writer who is already critically established and whose reputation for creating experimentally daring, wondrous fables will continue to ascend. Read her. Please. Take her words for it and take mine too. J/C