Aarik Danielsen is the arts and entertainment editor at the Columbia Daily Tribune in Columbia, Missouri. He also teaches at his alma mater, the University of Missouri School of Journalism. He writes a weekly column, The (Dis)content, for Fathom Magazine, and has been published at Image Journal, Plough, Entropy, EcoTheo Review and more. Find him on Twitter: @aarikdanielsen.
Finding Myself in Kristen Radtke’s Seek You
Peers romantically relate stories of childhood nights beneath the covers, beyond bedtime, a flashlight bulb intensifying the illumination from a book’s pages. I spent the same nights with my radio turned just above a whisper, baseball games beaming in from the California coast. The play-by-play man offered a young imagination chances to create pictures of […]
Still Moving: An Interview with Maggie Smith
The author of "Good Bones" on her new book, Keep Moving
Right now, on some corner of social media, someone is sharing Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones.” A wildfire in 17 lines, it was named “the official poem of 2016” by Public Radio International. “Good Bones” expressed the sensation—a slight shiver in any year, a palpable throbbing in that one—of living in a fixer-upper world. Last year, […]
A review of Sarah Sloat’s Hotel Almighty
Everything we learn about reading guides our eye and orders our understanding: left to right, one sentence to the next. Everything we learn about living does the same—here is the map for an ordered life. Now follow it. Sarah Sloat’s Hotel Almighty urges us to participate in our own re-creation, starting with how we see. […]
Handle With Care: Lore Ferguson Wilbert on her New Book
"All through Scripture there’s this beloved call for the Christian to give attention to their first home: their story, their skin, their body, their most immediate boundary of being."
The body doesn’t only keep the score of trauma, as Bessel van der Kolk’s influential work rightly asserts. Through the skin, bodies soak in sermons about the passions of the flesh. They rehearse sacred and secular liturgies of touch and avoidance. Bodies pray prayers they often don’t understand. Popular doctrines of embodiment and touch leave […]
On Soft Launch, Aaron Belz's latest book of poems
In a 2018 interview with poet Adrian Matejka, I floated a thought balloon to see whether he would chase it or pop it in an instant. More an aside than a proper question, I wondered aloud whether a gap exists between how we present poetry and its relevance to our lives. Matejka bought what I […]
Revisiting Ben Folds Five's The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner
Albums can be like old friends. Press play on something you first heard 20 years ago, and the result often resembles sitting down with someone from high school. Nostalgia carries the conversation, rubbing a shine into your first moments back together. Once you breathe out all the old stories, the names of old friends and […]
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