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Articles by Barbara Crooker
Why ICE agents hide their faces
We are becoming more familiar with this threatening figure. He was in Los Angeles, then in DC. He was in Chicago for nearly all of fall. He was sent to New York. He has been spotted in North Carolina, too. He is tall, broad-shouldered, and foreboding. He dresses in black, camouflage, and military green. He straps on a bulletproof vest. His pants are cargo, and his baseball cap has no logo. In Minneapolis, he shot and killed Renee Nicole Good. And he is hardly alone.
Minneapolis clergy exposed to pepper spray after rushing to scene of deadly ICE shooting
People protest as law enforcement officers attend to the scene of a shooting involving federal law enforcement, January 7, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Tom Baker) At least two pastors were among those shoved, shot at with pepper rounds, and exposed to pepper spray while protesting the actions of federal immigration agents in Minneapolis on Wednesday, as protesters demonstrated after a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed a woman who had been observing them.
Wreckage and euphoria
On the dedication page of Barbara Crooker’s new poetry collection, we read that her book is “For Richard, da cuore.” The Italian phrase can mean “with all my heart,” or even “from heart to heart.” The Richard in question is her husband, who died in 2021 after 46 years of marriage. And so, from the very start of this volume we are alerted to the kind of journey these poems will take: to loss, decline, and death. What can counter these inevitabilities?
The Sun Magazine | Something I Might Say | By Stephanie Austin | Issue 542
My father, on his deathbed, asked if I had any regrets about our relationship. The cancer had taken most of his voice, so all he could do was whisper, “Regrets?” I tossed my head back and laughed. I said, “Oh, my God, Dad.” I laughed again. I did not, and do not, have regrets. Well, I suppose I regret that I cannot put this scene in a story because it is a cliché.
Consolation and empathy in a time of plague: Some helpful readings
A funeral for a coronavirus victim in Milwaukee last week in late March. | Carrie Antlfinger / AP The world is passing through a time of epic plague, and empathy is in short supply. The usual observances are missing. Public gatherings don’t take place. Funerals are brief affairs, just quick burials or cremations. Eulogies are postponed. People return home to mourn alone, finding whatever solace may come though a shaky, impersonal online family video conference.
311: Listen,
Listen,by Barbara Crooker I want to tell you something. This morning is bright after all the steady rain, and every iris, peony, rose, opens its mouth, rejoicing. I want to say, wake up, open your eyes, there’s a snow-covered road ahead, a field of blankness, a sheet of paper, an empty screen. Even the smallest insects are singing, vibrating their entire bodies, tiny violins of longing and desire. We were made for song.
The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor
Because he can still cause a reaction in me when he talks about SN2 displacements, amines and esters looking for receptor sites at the base of their ketones. Because he lugs home serious tomes like The Journal of the American Chemical Society or The Proceedings of the Society of the Plastics Industry, the opposite of the slim volumes of poetry with colorful covers that fill my bookshelves.
The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor
First job. In tight black shorts and a white bowling shirt, red lipstick and bouncing ponytail, I present each overflowing tray as if it were a banquet. I’m sixteen and college-bound; this job’s temporary as the summer sun, but right now it’s the boundaries of my life. After the first few nights of mixed orders and missing cars, the work goes easily. I take out the silver trays and hook them to the windows, inhale the mingled smells of seared meat patties, salty ketchup, rich sweet malteds.
The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor
Sugar maples, little fires in the trees, every blazing gradation of orange to red, and this makes me think of you, the way you press the long length of your body against me, the heat seeping through flannel, my own private furnace. If only hands and feet had a color, it would be blue. From November until May, I cannot get warm. Even my bones have cores of ice. But you are a house on fire, an internal combustion system, Sriracha sauce/ jalapeño poppers/Thai curry.
The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor
This was a day when nothing happened, the children went off to school remembering their books, lunches, gloves. All morning, the baby and I built block stacks in the squares of light on the floor. And lunch blended into naptime, I cleaned out kitchen cupboards, one of those jobs that never gets done, then sat in a circle of sunlight and drank ginger tea, watched the birds at the feeder jostle over lunch’s little scraps. A pheasant strutted from the hedgerow, preened and flashed his jeweled head.
For a Friend Lying in Intensive Care Waiting for Her White Blood Cells to Rejuvenate After a Bone Marrow Transplant
The jonquils. They come back. They split the earth with their green swords, bearing cups of light. The forsythia comes back, spraying its thin whips with blossom, one loud yellow shout. The robins. They come back. They pull the sun on the silver thread of their song. The irises come back. They dance in the soft air in silken gowns of midnight blue. The lilacs come back. They trail their perfume like a scarf of violet chiffon.
The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor
We start by fanning out the money, colored like Necco wafers: pink, yellow, mint, gold. From the first roll of the dice, differences widen: the royal blues of Boardwalk and Park Place look down their noses at the grapey immigrants from Baltic and Mediterranean Avenues. My grandparents coming from Italy in steerage measured their gold in olive oil, not bank notes and deeds. The man in the top hat and tuxedo always holds the good cards. The rest of us hope we can pay the Electric Company.
POEM: 'A clear blue lake of flannel' - The Times: Life
Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2004 to 2006, writes: "When we’re feeling sorry for ourselves it can help to make a list of things for which we’re grateful. Here is a fine poem of gratitude by Barbara Crooker, who lives in Pennsylvania, and its images make up just such a list. This is from her book 'Small Rain' from Purple Flag Press." The sky hangs up its starry pictures: a swan, a crab, a horse. And even though you’re three hundred miles away, I know you see them, too.
The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor
Another October. The maples have done their slick trick of turning yellow almost overnight; summer’s hazy skies are cobalt blue. My friend has come in from the West, where it’s been a year of no mercy: chemotherapy, bone marrow transplant, more chemotherapy, and her hair came out in fistfuls, twice. Bald as a pumpkin. And then, the surgeon’s knife.
The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor
What can l say, now that summer’s gone, with the weight of its heat, its thick blanket of humidity, the cacophony of zinnias, marigolds, salvia? Now the sky is clear blue and cloudless, that sure one-note that can only mean October. You’re gone. The leaves turn gold in the calendar’s rotisserie, giving up their green, and the burning bushes have ignited, struck their book of matches. It’s enough to make the heart break, isn’t it? We keep going down the one road, there’s no turning back.
The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor
the golden hour of the clock of the year. Everything that can run to fruit has already done so: round apples, oval plums, bottom-heavy pears, black walnuts and hickory nuts annealed in their shells, the woodchuck with his overcoat of fat. Flowers that were once bright as a box of crayons are now seed heads and thistle down. All the feathery grasses shine in the slanted light. It’s time to bring in the lawn chairs and wind chimes, time to draw the drapes against the wind, time to hunker down.
Away In Virginia, I See a Mustard Field And Think Of You
because the blue hills are like the shoulder and slopes of your back as you sleep. Often I slip a hand under your body to anchor myself to this earth. The yellow mustard rises from a waving sea of green. I think of us driving narrow roads in France, under a tunnel of sycamores, my hair blowing in the hot wind, opera washing out of the radio, loud. We are feeding each other cherries from a white paper sack.
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