Trump’s Bible and Netanyahu’s Smiting

Donald Trump, Bible salesman

Throughout my Christian life, I’ve struggled to wrap my had around Psalm 137, which usually gets used liturgically in abbreviated form. The first several verses, written during the Babylonian exile, lament the experience of alienation from homeland, nation, and God. We see here beginning traces of the “foreigners in a strange land” ethos which undergirds much modern Judaism and Christianity. Then verse 9 veers abruptly:

“Happy is the one who seizes your infants / and dashes them against the rocks.”

The earliest Hebrew scriptures describe a national religion and an explicitly Israelite deity, not a universal one. The G-d described in the Pentateuch of Moses sides with Israel and aids Israelites in murdering “foreigners.” Not until the prophet Amos does Judaism begin embracing the idea that worshiping G-d is about honoring principles. Moses never intended the Levitical law to govern everyone, everywhere; he wrote the laws of a hill-dwelling agrarian nation in the Late Bronze Age.

Which brings us to two important current events. Israel’s ongoing pummeling of Palestinians in Gaza has reached a threshold which UN officials are willing to tentatively consider genocide. The Netanyahu administration’s continued strafing of civilian targets is merely the inevitable conclusion of Israeli policy which protects Israelis (as distinct from Israelites) at everyone else’s expense. Amnesty Internation has termed the Israeli government’s longstanding policies as “racism.”

Meanwhile, to cover mounting legal debts, former President Donald Trump has begun hawking Bibles online. This salesmanship doesn’t surprise me, as his core voting bloc conflates being Christian with being American. Rather, I take profound exception at the contents of Trump’s Bible. According to press reports, the King James translation comes bound together with the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Pledge of Allegiance, and Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.”

In other words, Trump’s Bible includes American national law and an American patriotic psalm—erm, I mean “song”—bound together as a rudimentary Third Testament. American conservatives have long considered the Declaration and Constitution as divinely inspired documents, a position that’s literally Mormon doctrine. Yet in literally binding American nationalism into the Bible, Trump is dragging Christianity backward into a proto-Hebrew Bronze Age.

Netanyahu and Trump share a theological worldview founded in the Levitical notion that whatever benefits the nation, and especially whatever benefits the nation’s oligarchs, necessarily benefits the faith. It bears noting, as Obery Hendricks writes, that the High Priesthood of Solomon’s Temple, described in both Jewish and Christian scriptures, wasn’t merely an airy-fairy religious grouping. The priesthood governed the nation, often on behalf of conquering empires.

Benjamin Netanyahu, acolyte
of his country's secular Priesthood

Let me state, before I continue, I realize my “Judeo-Christian” language is sweeping. Though Judaism and Christianity germinated in the same Levantine soil, they historically parted ways following Bar Kochba’s Rebellion, and are substantially different now. Yet because both religions share common ancestry in Moses, Amos, and Isaiah, we can, for convenience, address them syncretically for the moment. Because we’re seeing both being degraded right now.

Isaiah and Jesus shared the recognition that worldly empires can break the body. Kings anointed by G-d die, whether through violence or through age and entropy. Investing religious sacrality in human governments means placing trust in something which inevitably rots. Rather, the deity extoled by prophets and Christ wasn’t bound to any nation or land (though Third Isaiah still called Israelites to come home). Ha-Shem dwells, instead, among the believers.

In this regard, global Judaism has perhaps handled the prophetic call with greater integrity than Christianity. Since the days of Nehemiah, global Judaism has recognized that one becomes Jewish by honoring Jewish heritage and maintaining Jewish practice, even when resident in strange lands. To be Jewish, in today’s Judaism, means accepting the world as transitory. Don’t conform to kings and kingdoms, but stand fast in Truth.

Christianity, by contrast, regularly conforms to kingdoms. Though conservative Christians think themselves pure because they dump on out-groups like Muslims or LGBTQIA+, they nevertheless seek worldly power, something Jesus abhorred. Ever since Emperor Constantine, Christians have thought themselves worthy to govern, and to enforce their moral code on everyone. Or anyway, as Gorski and Perry write, White Christians have thought that.

Netanyahu’s Israel has something global Judaism hasn’t had for over two millennia: state power. Therefore Netanyahu makes the same mistake which Trump and other nominal Christians have made throughout those same ages, thinking state power comes from G-d. Whether through adding new Biblical texts, like Trump, or ignoring the prophets’ convictions, like Netanyahu, the effect is similar: both leaders drag their nations backward into the Bronze Age.

Follow-up: Trump’s Bible, Part Two and Trump’s Bible, Part Three

Radium, Capitalism, and America

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 117
Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women, and D.W. Gregory, Radium Girls

In the early 20^th Century, American industry was all a-flutter over this new-fangled mineral the Curies discovered in France: radium. Rare and expensive, but highly charged, radium had early commercial uses in patent medicines, cancer treatments, and even cosmetics. But it had its most lucrative boom in luminous paint. Radium paint appeared in wristwatches, dashboard instrument dials, and other technical processes. The women who hand-painted those dials were paid well.

When British author Kate Moore started reading about the radium fad, which happened mostly between the World Wars, she discovered that nearly everything published dealt with the science and the scientists. Nobody ever compiled much about the dial-painters, who were almost exclusively women in their teens and twenties. But the dial-painters paid the highest price for industrial radium, which caused sarcomas, osteoporosis, and a revolting disorder called Radium Jaw.

So Moore decided to close the gap. She pored through countless documents, many of which had remained in storage for decades or never seen outside the family, to reconstruct the lives of blue-collar women frequently overlooked by mainstream historians. Moore reveals a handful of young women whose modest ambitions included the desire to become wives, mothers, artists, or entrepreneurs. History had other plans, turning them into spokespeople for the changing times.

Radium dial-painters in Orange, New Jersey, and Ottawa, Illinois, used techniques first pioneered in painting expensive bone china. The painters mostly started work around age fourteen or fifteen; Moore says one started painting aged only eleven. They used camel-hair brushes, and to accurately paint small numerals, they got their brushes to a fine point by putting the bristles in their mouths. Thus they ingested microscopic amounts of radium.

But saying “microscopic amounts” does the poisoning an injustice. Radium bonded with calcium in their bones, where it emitted constant radiation with a half-life beyond a millennium. Years after leaving their jobs, many women began experiencing the first common symptom: tooth decay. But their teeth were only the external symptom. Their entire lower jaws, exposed directly to radium, were rotting out of their mouths. Many witnessed their mouths crumble.

Though the women had were fortunate to find doctors who believed them, and helped them seek treatment, the medical establishment refused to believe radium was dangerous. Not just medicine, either—their employers, backed with armies of attorneys, stonewalled the legal system to prevent having to accept responsibility for their former workers. Using legal maneuvers that sound suspiciously familiar a century later, they abused the courts to remain rich and untouchable.

The companies, U.S. Radium Corporation and the Radium Dial Company, shared a common technique: deny and stall the proceedings until the women died, almost all painfully and ignominiously. If they outlived the women, the cases lacked a plaintiff, and culpability went away. Thus these companies pioneered the literal process of privileging their profits over workers’ lives, an approach that remains commonplace today.

Grace Fryer, unofficial captain
of the New Jersey radium girls

Dial-painters, who were again almost entirely women, began working as teenagers around 1917; nobody was held legally responsible for their suffering and death until 1938. The decades-long slog through medical and legal delays presaged the hurdles faced by many working-class Americans in subsequent decades, suffering injuries caused by silica, heavy metals, hydrocarbons, and other pollutants. The dial-painters simply came first, thus paving the way for others.

Worse, industrial stonewalling techniques remain commonplace today. Though the dial-painters’ ordeal led to America instituting worker safety regulations, many companies now simply move manufacturing to unregulated economies in Latin America or the Pacific Rim. There, they repeat the pattern of hiring teenagers with slim, lithe fingers, working them to capacity, then denying responsibility for their workplace injuries, which sometimes manifest only years later.

Playwright D.W. Gregory recounts the New Jersey dial-painters, whose suffering came first, and whose legal struggles captivated an American public basking in the glow of that other innovation, the wire service. Gregory presents a snappy, fast-paced memory play, depicting one painter, Grace Fryer, and her struggle to receive her day in court. Backed by volunteers and her fellow dial-painters, Grace militarizes national media to get public opinion on her side.

Despite what you’d expect, Gregory’s play was produced fifteen years before Moore’s book appeared; Moore cites Gregory in her bibliography. Gregory’s version is both quicker and more intimate, eschewing the technical details and knowledge Moore lavishes. One could read these as two versions of the same story: one personal and close, the other inclusive and exhaustive. They’re two ways of looking at an event that changed America’s relationship with the moneyed class.

Living in the Liars’ Economy

Elon Musk

It’s become a truism, at least in certain circles, that money doesn’t exist. That is, it doesn’t exist apart from our belief in it. Money, as a numerical representation of value, gains its worth from law, tradition, and our willingness to accept it. Kurt Vonnegut teased, in his 1985 novel Galápagos, what might happen if humans worldwide accepted money’s fictional nature. He posited that society would collapse, and take humanity with it.

Watching Donald Trump’s inability to pay his legal debts unfold in real time, I’ve reconsidered exactly what that means. The obvious position, long favored by progressives and reform-minded citizens, holds that because money is fictitious, our economy holds people artificially in poverty, and nothing but political will prevents us from fixing that. Yet we see now that Trump lied money into existence—and that, as his lies unravel, the money also vanishes.

When Trump lied to banks to collateralize his capital, that money came into existence. That’s how money originates: not through the Federal Reserve printing more currency, but through banks loaning promissory notes. Because well-off banksters saw Trump as trustworthy, they bestowed such promissory notes on his corporation, bringing money into existence. Had his lies remained covert, that money would probably remain in circulation today.

This phenomenon isn’t unique to Trump. America watched Elon Musk, purportedly a centibillionare in his own right, muster others’ financial backing to seize Xitter and transform it into his personal vanity platform. Now he’s paying interest installments on a massive underwater loan as the platform retains only hard-core users and White Nationalists. Worse, his high-profile mismanagement spills onto his other properties; Tesla and SpaceX have black eyes by proxy.

Mark Zuckerberg

Similar lies cascade down the tech-economy chain. Mark Zuckerberg lied about video engagement on Facebook, creating increased business and market valuation, which he reinvested. Then the lie came out. Innumerable video creators lost their shirts, and Facebook stock temporarily pitted. Again, had the lie been better managed, the money Zuckerberg fibbed into existence would’ve remained in circulation. In these cases, money is literally a lie.

I’ve casually observed elsewhere that supposed centibillionaires like Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos don’t really have the money their supposed net worth implies. Their “worth” is mostly bound up in stocks, securities, and other financial devices. Though these devices have putative market value, the owners can never sell them, because they gain value by the illusion of scarcity. If they sell, the devices become less scarce, and their value will tank.

Because banks loan money into existence, loan practices are necessarily zero-sum functions. Banks loan rich people money at bargain-basement prices, and often renegotiate debt at a loss to keep rich people’s business coming. But borrowers with limited capital, fixed incomes, or a short borrowing history—the poor, the young, and the elderly—pay above market value for home, business, and student loans. Just another way it’s expensive to be poor.

This is ironic, because anybody who knows real poor people knows they’re scrupulous about repaying debts. Unless they’re truly destitute, actual working poor will work themselves into medical collapse to remain current on their mortgages, car loans, and person-to-person handshake debts. I’ve seen friends living hand-to-mouth, reduced to tears because they believe their insuperable student debts reflect their personal moral value.

Jeff Bezos

Thus, when wealthy people sink money into illiquid assets, like land or market futures, they don’t just bind money; they bind society’s trust. We invest our collective belief in the idea that capitalists know how to manage machines they’ve never operated, or coordinate teams they’ve never met. We believe it, and therefore it becomes true. Then they demand the law enforce their absentee title on capital they can’t physically possess.

Maria Konnikova writes that con-artists prey upon the very morals of trust and community which make organized society possible. Despite what high-handed moralists claim, falling victim to swindlers doesn’t make you weak; it actually means you possess an abundance of the morals which built modern society. That makes it especially important to arrest grifters, because they’re manipulating not individuals, but the very foundations of industrialized civilization.

When bad-faith actors like Trump, Musk, or Zuckerberg lie money into existence, they do so by manipulating our trust. Those who have faced such manipulation know that, when trust is severed, it grows back only slowly, only painfully. We gain human value—including financial value—only from the human community. Therefore these liars don’t just hurt themselves or the financial markets they manipulate. They scorch the roots of modern, settled civilization.

Everyone Loves a Dragon Queen, Part 2

This essay follows my prior review, Everyone Loves a Dragon Queen. In the review, I attempted to avoid spoilers. In this essay, I make no such effort; if you would like to watch the movie, please do so before reading any further here.

Princess Elodie (Millie Bobby Brown) has had it with your myths, in Damsel

When Prince Henry tosses his bride, Princess Elodie, into the dragon’s chasm, on one level we witness a conventional myth. Like Jesus or Orpheus, Elodie must pass through the grave, defeat the chthonic monster, and return bearing the truth. On another level, we witness an uncomfortable reality that past myths elided: that the truth our hero brings from beyond the grave isn’t what we want to hear. And we don’t know how that truth will change us.

Tolkien and Lewis aggressively embraced fairy tales in a specific context, following the degradations of two world wars. Both fought in World War I before becoming scholars, then sat helplessly through World War II and the Blitz. As Christians, both men believed true morality existed, but they couldn’t see it around them. So they sought moral certitude in distant lands and times, an evasion of the present which Lewis himself acknowledged outright.

Today’s fairy tales, like the movie Damsel, emerge from a different context. Where both Tolkien and Lewis yearned to restore divinely anointed god-kings to their fairylands’ thrones, we live in the backwash of colonial empires, unable to pretend the past we admire consisted of unadulterated goodness. No matter where we live, our land was seized from another people, maybe recently, maybe centuries ago. But literally everyone lives on stolen land.

Damsel enacts this myth in stark realism. Queen Isabelle of Aurea and her superficially charming son, Henry, live on land stolen from the dragon. They admit this during the closing rituals of the marriage ceremony. They must propitiate this distant past through continual sacrifice, through the blood of those descended from the original settlers. Aurea’s continued glittering prosperity relies on someone reënacting that original conquest.

Here we might benefit from consulting prior religious scholars. Émile Durkheim believed that religion begins by extoling the people’s innate virtues; God, Durkheim believed, came late to religion. What Durkheim called “primitive” religion simply preserves the people’s shared virtues by ritualizing them. Mircea Eliade went further, seeing the liturgical calendar as a continuing reënactment of the religion’s founding moments. We walk forever in our prophets’ shoes.

In this regard, Queen Isabelle acts not as her nation’s political leader, but its priest. (No commoners speak in this movie; every character is aristocratic, or an aristocrat’s courtier.) She enacts her nation’s founding sacrifice, preserving peace and stability through blood. Sure, she uses a technicality to weasel out of the actual sacrifice, making beautiful foreigners pay Aurea’s actual blood debt. But the forms matter to national religion, not the spirit.

Princess Elodie (Millie Bobby Brown) and Prince Henry (Nick Robinson)

Passing through the grave, Princess Elodie returns with the capital-T Truth that Aurea’s founding myth is a lie. Aurea’s founding king attacked the dragon, not to preserve his people, but to enlarge his own glory; he slaughtered the land’s original inhabitants, the dragons, purely for spite. The dragon appears monstrous to living humans because mythology has created this terror, but Truth says humans must abandon this belief and confront their own guilt.

The parallels with modernity are so stark, they need acknowledged but not explicated. As an American, I realize my Anglo-Saxon ancestors seized this land from its prior inhabitants. But that’s what Anglo-Saxons do, as they also previously conquered Britain from its Celtic inhabitants. Not that those Celts were innocent, as their mythology describes seizing Britain from Albion, a terrible giant whose exaggerated evil resembles that of Elodie’s dragon.

Every human nation sits on conquered land. Every nation also has founding myths to justify that conquest. Virgil invented a conquest myth to justify Roman military might, and India’s earliest Vedic poetry is a fight song in praise of seizing a neighboring tribe’s women. Only recently has public morality evolved to consider conquest unsavory, mostly after two World Wars, when technology made conquest both visible and grisly in wholly new ways.

Damsel ends with Aurea’s capital in flames. Though the camera lingers on Queen Isabelle’s death, we know nothing of the civilians caught in that conflagration. Because although every myth and fairy tale agrees that exposing the Truth will liberate the oppressed, we don’t know what comes next. The Bible claims that the triumphant Truth will simply conclude this Age. This movie follows the scriptural precedent, burning human kingdoms down and sailing into a vague future.

Lewis and Tolkien loved fairy tales because they believed their mythology could address modern questions without modern moral blurriness. Damsel arguably takes the same tack. However, it proceeds from an assumption that the mythic past wasn’t as pearly as prior generations believed.

Everyone Loves a Dragon Queen

Millie Bobby Brown as Princess Elodie in Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's Damsel

What is it with filmmakers chopping off Millie Bobby Brown’s hair? The haircuts are explicitly gendered, too, or anyway counter-gendered. In her first featured role, Intruders, she gave herself a weirdly genderless half-bob to emphasize the show’s supernatural themes. Stranger Things obviously involved her learning how to be a girl. Now, in Damsel, another self-inflicted haircut signposts her transition from “princess” to “warrior queen.”

Any analysis of Damsel necessarily involves admitting this is a movie for mainly young audiences. Grown-ups will almost obsessively notice the prior media products this movie pinches from. This includes obvious borrowings from LotR and Game of Thrones, and less widely viewed fare, like 2019’s Ready or Not and your nephew’s latest Dungeons & Dragons campaign. There’s even a helpful map carved into a wall, guiding player characters to safety.

Younger viewers, unburdened by prior experience, will probably enjoy this movie, simply for MBB’s character. Princess Elodie spends nearly half the movie onscreen alone, sometimes accompanied by a CGI dragon. She’s dressed inappropriately for the environment, still wearing her wedding dress, and has no tools, weapons, or food. She extemporizes survival gear from whatever comes to hand. Princess Elodie is, admittedly, gripping to watch.

Queen Isabelle tempts Elodie from her icy, impoverished homeland by promising her son, Prince Henry, as a groom. Elodie, though a princess, is reasonably self-reliant, and chops wood herself to provide for her subjects during an unusually bitter winter. But Prince Henry and the Kingdom of Aurea offer Elodie the opportunity to see a larger world and live without constant fear. Despite her youth, Elodie acquiesces to this arranged marriage.

Unfortunately, the movie’s trailer already spoiled the twist that caps Act One: the marriage is a lie. Isabelle and Henry need Elodie as a sacrifice for a nameless dragon whose mountain overshadows the kingdom. Cast headlong into the dragon’s lair, Elodie must struggle not only to escape, but to uncover the long-simmering ancestral lie that makes her sacrifice necessary. Because her survival doesn’t matter if Queen Isabelle sacrifices Elodie’s sister.

Robin Wright, who kick-started her career playing a similarly betrothed ingenue in The Princess Bride, portrays Queen Isabelle with the same oily deceit she probably learned from her co-star, Chris Sarandon. (Yet another cinematic borrowing.) Meanwhile the dragon, voiced by Iranian-American actor Shoreh Agdashloo, seems transplanted from Shrek—yes, seriously. Because Elodie’s and Shrek’s dragons share character motivations entirely female in nature.

Yes, that’s a stereotype, but a useful one.

Robin Wright as Queen Isabelle in Damsel

Elodie’s character arc isn’t new, or even particularly recent. The “Princess Rescues Herself” trope certainly predates my awareness of fantasy literature: almost from the moment Tolkien solidified the genre’s standards, fans began rewriting Arwen-type characters into greater self-reliance. But MBB invests this road-tested story arc with the gravitas she brings to characters like Eleven. Elodie is strong, not because it’s a genre boilerplate, but because she has no other choice.

Brown conveys her internal transformation externally. She’s thrown into the dragon’s pit still wearing her satin wedding dress, without tools or weapons. The more determined Elodie becomes to survive, the more pieces of her elegant gown tear off. She fashions bandages from her skirts, a glowworm lantern from her sleeves, a climbing piton from her corset stays. Piece by piece, the emblems of luxury transform into the tools of survival.

This results in an outcome that may give some parents pause: the more resilient and self-assured Elodie becomes, the more naked she becomes. That’s also where the hair-chopping comes in, as her long, elegant tresses become an impediment to survival. Elodie emerges victorious and muscular, but also showing plenty of skin. She saunters into her triumphant scene reduced to torn, scorched undergarments, looking like a Frank Frazetta splash panel.

Given the movie’s primarily young target audience, this nakedness, coupled with some Game of Thrones-ish violence, will give some parents pause. It doesn’t rely on explicit sex or coarse language, and anyway, most middle-grade viewers have probably seen content more graphic online anymore, so tweens and early teens will undoubtedly enjoy it. If your kids are grade-school-aged, though, maybe consider watching beside them, just in case.

Some prior critics lambasted this movie for unrealistic standards. Eldie outruns fire, survives catastrophic injury, and handles a sword correctly the first time she grabs one. Apparently some people find this implausible in a movie with an immortal fire-breathing dragon. Picky, picky, picky. The movie’s intended audience will have no such qualms; they’ll simply enjoy watching Elodie survive. And parents will enjoy watching their kids enjoy it.

This review continues in Everyone Loves a Dragon Queen, Part 2

The Modern Anglo-Japanese Troubadour

Jan Miklaszewicz, The Promise: A Narrative Poem

In a distant valley of a distant nation, the word comes down: our prince is going to war, and the knight of the village must report. The knight’s wife has a grim premonition, but it isn’t within the knight’s star to say no, so he girds on his sword and marches into battle. Every night she walks the village parapets, watching to see whether and when her beloved soldier returns.

English poet Jan Miklaszewicz dresses his narrative in Japanese vestments; his knight is a samurai, and his lord a daimyo. But the themes of Miklaszewicz’s verse novella are familiar from countless Childe ballads and French troubadour rhymes. The image of a knight with conflicting duties occurs in numerous folksongs and official poetry. We only wait to see whether the beloved’s fatal visions are doomed to come true.

Miklaszewicz writes his novella in tanka, a major Japanese verse structure. Usually written in a single line of kanji, the English-language tanka usually breaks into five lines, with strict syllable counts. Japanese tanka usually aren’t narrative themselves, but most often embedded in a larger prose narrative, like their more famous offshoot, the haiku. Miklaszewicz instead expands the form, using the syllable count to define the stanza counts of his chapters.

The feudal Japan Miklaszewicz describes is a dreamland, a no-place devoid of proper nouns. It’s dotted with waving grasses and ancient shrines, and village life is languid until the daimyo’s call arrives. Attentive readers will recognize the landscape from Chretien de Troyes’ mythical Arthurian Britain. This isn’t a knock against Miklaszewicz’s storytelling: as C.S. Lewis pointed out, true virtue is always in another time, in a distant land.

Thus freed from strict realism, Miklaszewicz lets his familiar troubadour themes play out. Nothing really new happens, if you’re familiar with the English folk ballad tradition, but that doesn’t mean there’s no suspense. The Childe ballads contain enough variations that their stories could go multiple directions, and we never know what comes next until it happens, then it seems downright inevitable. The same thing happens here.

And Miklaszewicz uses his medieval verse form artfully. His language is so rhythmical that readers can practically hear the plucked shamisen behind the stanzas. Miklaszewicz’s Japan evokes images from sumi-e paintings and Hokusai’s block prints: fragrant, melodious, and mythical.

In their village home
she senses a subtle shift,
a kindling of hope,
and in the eye of her mind
she glimpses his sweet return,

Jan Miklaszewicz

(Every stanza and chapter ends with a comma, emphasizing that we haven’t reached the end. Miklaszewicz doesn’t include a period until the final line.)

Let me interrupt myself to address an important concern that more attentive readers might’ve already anticipated. I recognize the risks inherent in a Western poet using Japanese verse forms and a Japanese mythical setting. Colonial-era European writers like Lord Byron or Rudyard Kipling exploited “inscrutable Orient” twaddle to romanticize imperial conquest. I’ve read enough Edward Said to know that Orientalist mythmaking has had adverse consequences.

Yet Japanese poets themselves wrote considerable volumes of similar dreamland exploration. Bashō, who popularized the haiku form, wrote travelogues so expansive and mythical that recent critics question whether he visited the described places. Travel, to medieval Japanese writers, wasn’t about accurately depicting the visited lands; it was about the subjective experience of abandoning one’s comfort zone and wandering off the map.

In that regard, Miklaszewicz does what most modern Anglophone poets aspire to accomplish: making the familiar unfamiliar, the distant near, and the real world subjective. He uses comfortable themes his likely readers will recognize from folk ballads and traditional poetry, but filters them through his imagination. The product is cozy, without being sleepy. And it rewards multiple levels of reading, from the casual to the scholarly.

I mentioned French troubadours previously. These traveling poets, and their Irish colleagues the bards, made their names by composing and singing verses about distant lands, mythical battles, and noble warriors. Miklaszewicz joins that tradition, updating it for a more cosmopolitan and literate age. His versifying is both familiar and new, using pre-Renaissance storytelling conventions for an audience more familiar with a diverse world. His product is surprising and comfy.

This poem is melodious, sweeping, and short: committed readers could savvy it in one sitting. Miklaszewicz’s storytelling carries readers along without resistance. Yet like the best poetry—including the Childe ballads I keep mentioning—the verse rewards a slow savoring and lingering contemplation. Reading it, we feel transported outside ourselves, and upon returning, we feel we’ve truly traveled somewhere magical.