Not long ago, I was listening to Apple Music — the usual shuffle, half-attentive — when a song stopped me. Something in the voice. A particular quality I couldn’t immediately name, somewhere between warmth…

Theodor Adorno once declared that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. It was not a provocation so much as a wound: a fundamental doubt about whether beauty can be spoken of at all…

It was that uncertain hour when dusk has not quite surrendered to dark. We had just left a wake — my colleague and I, both attorneys — and the smell of the funeral home…