These Are Strange Times, My Dear: Field Notes From the Republic

The pointed and wide-ranging essays in Wendy Willis’s These Are Strange Times, My Dear (Counterpoint) explore everything from personal resistance to the rise of political podcasts, civic loneliness to the exploitation of personal data, public outrage to the opioid crisis – all with a poet’s gift for finding the sacred in the mundane, a hope in the dark. Again and again, Willis returns to the question posed by Czech writer, activist, and politician Václav Havel: What does it mean to live in truth? As a way to hear this question and to begin an answer, Willis circles around it, to realize her duties and reactions to truth and power as a woman, mother, lawyer, and poet – and as an American.