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spring

The Hill We Climb

April 7, 2021 By Amanda Gorman Filed Under: Part of the Solution Tagged With: amanda gorman, poetry, spring, spring 2021

When day comes, we ask ourselves where can we find light in this never-ending shade? 

The loss we carry, a sea we must wade. 

We’ve braved the belly of the beast.

We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace,

and the norms and notions of what “just” is isn’t always justice.

And yet, the dawn is ours before we knew it.

Somehow we do it.

Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken,

but simply unfinished.

We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny Black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president, only to find herself reciting for one.

And yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine,

but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect.

We are striving to forge our union with purpose.

To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters, and conditions of man.

And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us.

We close the divide because we know, to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside.

We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another.

We seek harm to none and harmony for all.

Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true:

That even as we grieved, we grew.

That even as we hurt, we hoped.

That even as we tired, we tried.

That we’ll forever be tied together, victorious.

Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division.

Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one shall make them afraid.

If we’re to live up to our own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made.

That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb, if only we dare.

It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit.

It’s the past we step into and how we repair it.

We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it.

Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.

This effort very nearly succeeded.

But while democracy can be periodically delayed,

it can never be permanently defeated.

In this truth, in this faith, we trust,

for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us. 

This is the era of just redemption. 

We feared it at its inception. 

We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour, 

but within it, we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves.

So while once we asked, ‘How could we possibly prevail over catastrophe?’ now we assert, ‘How could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?’

We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be: 

A country that is bruised but whole, benevolent but bold, fierce and free. 

We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation. 

Our blunders become their burdens. 

But one thing is certain: 

If we merge mercy with might, and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change, our children’s birthright.

So let us leave behind a country better than the one we were left. 

With every breath from my bronze-pounded chest, we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one. 

We will rise from the golden hills of the west. We will rise from the wind-swept north-east where our forefathers first realized revolution. 

We will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the midwestern states. W

e will rise from the sun-baked south. 

We will rebuild, reconcile, and recover.

In every known nook of our nation, in every corner called our country, our people, diverse and beautiful, will emerge, battered and beautiful.

When day comes, we step out of the shade, aflame and unafraid. 

The new dawn blooms as we free it. 

For there is always light, 

if only we’re brave enough to see it. 

If only we’re brave enough to be it.

Filed Under: Part of the Solution Tagged With: amanda gorman, poetry, spring, spring 2021

The Slope Survey: Daniella Stromberg

June 26, 2018 By admin Filed Under: Slope Survey Tagged With: Brooklyn, interview, local, Park Slope, Slope Survey, spa, spring

The Slope Survey returns for its 8th installment with Daniella Stromberg, a native New Yorker, born and raised in the West Village and owner of d’mai Urban Spa on Fifth Avenue. Daniella opened the spa in 2004. Working with her team to provide a neighborhood sanctuary has been both a thrilling learning experience and a true honor as well.

What brought you to Park Slope? 

I moved back to NYC in 1994. I had been living in Amsterdam and somehow returning to Manhattan just felt wrong. Park Slope was beautiful, progressive, had a great Park and seemed close to “the city” (as we called it then).

What is your most memorable Park Slope moment?  

Before opening d’mai, friends and I celebrated my new lease by drinking champagne in the old fish market before construction. It was basically just all cement – a blank canvas filled with possibility.

Describe your community superpower.  

Kindness.

 If you could change one thing about the neighborhood, what wuld it be?

I wish more of our restaurants stayed open later.

What do you think Park Slope will look like in 10 years?

Things are always changing! It’s so hard to know what this next wave will look like…I imagine even more skyscrapers. To be honest, I find them jarring right now. In 10 years, I think the waterfront and canal restoration will bring the new and old together beautifully.

What are you reading, would you recommend it?  

I’m actually re-reading “Me Talk Pretty One Day”, by David Sedaris. I love it just as much as the first 4 or 5 reads.

 What is your greatest extravagance?  

Full length cashmere bathrobe; I’ve had it for many years and it still looks and feel amazing.

If you couldn’t live in Park Slope or in Brooklyn, where would you go?  

Easy—the North Fork of Long Island!

Who is your hero, real or fictional?

I’m blown away by the student activists. They’ve given us hope that our nation really will get through this.

Last Word, What is turning you on these days?

The fact that winter is over and SPRING IS HERE.

Filed Under: Slope Survey Tagged With: Brooklyn, interview, local, Park Slope, Slope Survey, spa, spring

Spring Reading

April 19, 2018 By Anna Storm Filed Under: Books Tagged With: books, fresh, list, new, reading, recommendation, season, spring

Spring has sprung, which means it’s time to head to the park for an afternoon—or several of them—of outdoor reading. Below, our recommendations for the best new books to read under a Prospect Park tree:

 

1. The House of Broken Angels

by Luis Alberto Urrea

From Pulitzer Prize finalist Urrea (The Devil’s Highway) comes a multigenerational saga of loss, love and the borderlands between cultures. The family of Miguel de La Cruz, or “Big Angel,” has gathered to celebrate the dying patriarch’s final birthday, when, unexpectedly, Big Angel’s elderly mother passes away. As the weekend unfolds and the Mexican-American clan recounts its family legends, Big Angel’s half-brother, “Little Angel,” wrestles with his half-Mexican, half-gringo identity. Urrea, whose brother was dying of cancer when his own mother passed, has said the sprawling narrative is based on true experiences.

 

2. The Chandelier

by Clarice Lispector

This sophomore novel of literary giantess Lispector is available in English now for the first time. Initially published in Portuguese in 1946, The Chandelier is a stream-of-consciousness account of the life, loves and densely worded thoughts of our protagonist, Virginia. We follow Virginia through her childhood with her brother and best friend, Daniel; across the years with a group of aesthetes; and as her heart breaks when Daniel becomes engaged. Lispector would go on to write such classics as The Passion According to G.H., and to be remembered by American author Benjamin Moser as the most important Jewish writer in the world since Kafka.

 

3. The Female Persuasion

by Meg Wolitzer

When ambitious Greer Kadetsky lands her dream job at the foundation of her feminist icon, Faith Frank, her future could not seem brighter. But as time passes and Kadetsky is forced to contend with twists and tragedies, her understanding of Frank the woman, as well as what it means to be a woman at all, changes. Wolitzer’s first book for adults since her 2013 hit The Interestings tackles the female zeitgeist with, according to TIME, “a gimlet eye.” 

 

4. Warlight

by Michael Ondaatje

A coming-of-age novel set in Britain just after WWII, Warlight tells the story of Nathaniel and his sister, Rachel, who, as children, were left by their mother to the care of a mysterious man named “the Moth.” They soon learn their mother lied to them when she gave her reason for leaving. Years later, Nathaniel pieces together all that he failed to understand as a child, taking us along for the unconventionally written ride through recollections, facts and speculation. Ondaatgje previously won the Booker Prize for the romance, The English Patient. 

 

5. Islandborn

by Junot Diaz

The acclaimed author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao makes his first foray into children’s literature with the picture book, Islandborn. Everyone in Lola’s class is from somewhere else. When their teacher asks that they draw “the country you were originally from,” Lola becomes anxious. She knows she’s from “The Island,” but she doesn’t remember the place. Soon she’s embarking on a quest to understand her heritage, interviewing family, friends and neighbors, who describe a beautiful, vibrant land, which was yet rife with fear and turmoil. Questions of belonging and collective memory give this slim book, illustrated by Leo Espinosa, novelistic heft.

 

6. Tomorrow Will Be Different

by Sarah McBride

McBride may be only 27, but the eventful life she has led to date more than justifies this publication of her memoirs. For those who can’t place the name, McBride is the national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign as well as the first transgender person to speak at a national convention. Tomorrow Will Be Different chronicles her struggle to come out while acting as American University student-body president, her political fights for equal rights, and her relationship with the transgender man who would become her husband before tragically dying of cancer. Alternately political and personal, Tomorrow Will Be Different is a stirring account of one remarkable woman’s life and loves.

 

7. The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

The author of The Empathy Exams returns with this nonfiction examination of her journey toward sobriety. Interwoven among autobiographical accounts are reflections on famous alcoholic writers, including John Berryman and Raymond Carver, as well as works of reportage and literary criticism. The book’s erudition and, yes, empathy, have earned the writer, who has been compared to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, high praise.

 

8. Not That Bad

Edited by Roxane Gay

Bad Feminist’s Roxane Gay edits this anthology of essays—some previously published, others issued here for the first time—on rape and sexual assault. Writer-contributors include actors Gabrielle Union and Ally Sheedy and authors like Amy Jo Burns and Bob Shacochis. Not That Bad is an unflinching examination of a world in which women who speak out are, in the words of Gay, “routinely second-guessed, blown off, discredited, denigrated, besmirched, belittled, patronized, mocked, shamed, gaslit, insulted, bullied.”

 

9. Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”

by Zora Neale Hurston

A remarkable literary achievement, Barracoon is Zora Neale Hurston’s nonfiction account of American slavery, based on her interviews with one of the last known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade. The author of Their Eyes Were Watching God tells the story of elderly Cudjo Lewis, whom she met in 1927, and who was abducted from Africa before being taken to the United States 50 years after the U.S. officially abolished the slave trade. From his childhood in Africa, to the horrors of abduction and The Middle Passage, to life in America and the founding of an African-centric community in Alabama, Cudjo’s story is told in Hurston’s inimitably compassionate style.

 

10.  The Opposite of Hate

by Sally Kohn

With this book, CNN commentator—and Park Slope resident!—Sally Kohn has set herself a difficult task: “to discover why we hate and how [we] can stop it.” She speaks with researchers and scientists in an effort to learn about the cultural and evolutionary roots of hate, travels around the world, from Rwanda to the Middle East and around the United States, profiling people commonly associated with notions of hatred: white supremacists, terrorists and Twitter trolls, to name a few. And she probes several shameful moments from her own past, when she failed to do what, with this book, she hopes to help others do: wander out from “this wilderness of hate.”

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: books, fresh, list, new, reading, recommendation, season, spring

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