Micah Mattix

Virginia Beach

Poetry editor @firstthingsmag, prof @RegentU. Formerly: @thespectator, @amconmag, @weeklystandard. Substack: https://t.co/eeN7gzTSm2

Articles

A Descent Into Poe's Maelstrom

3 weeks ago | conservativereview.com | Micah Mattix
A Descent Into Poe's Maelstrom

3 weeks ago | freebeacon.com | Micah Mattix

Few American writers are as intriguing as Edgar Allan Poe. The author of stories that are still shockingly violent, Poe himself was something of a Jekyll and Hyde—sensitive and kind when sober, but manic and violent when drunk—who lived much of his life in debt after being raised by one of Richmond's richest families. Some of the more salacious details of his life are widely known.
Micah Mattix | The New Criterion

1 month ago | newcriterion.com | Micah Mattix

Select an AuthorAbel, LionelAbowitz, RichardAdams, HarryAdams, J.
When books came home

Dec 12, 2024 | washingtonexaminer.com | Micah Mattix

I rise in the middle of the night, go outdoors at sunrise, but both in the fields and at home I study, think, read, and write … Every day I wander over the rocky mountains, through the dewy valleys and caverns … Meanwhile here I have established my Rome, my Athens, and my spiritual fatherland; here I gather all the friends I now have or did have … I marvel at their accomplishments and their spirits … conversing with them more willingly than with those who think they are alive … I thus wander...
Success has many fathers, but Gladiator II is an orphan

Nov 28, 2024 | washingtonexaminer.com | Micah Mattix

The original Gladiator is Ridley Scott’s magnum opus and remains one of the best films since the turn of the century. The script, despite being written on the fly, had great lines. Everyone old enough to have watched the original remembers “Are you not entertained?” and “What we do in life echoes in eternity.” These were delivered by a Russell Crowe in his prime — charming, sensitive, and as hard as nails.
Art That Risks Nothing

Nov 20, 2024 | prufrock.substack.com | Micah Mattix

Dean Kissick’s essay in the latest issue of Harper’s starts with the wildest lede you’re likely to read this year:My mother lost both of her legs on the way to the Barbican Art Gallery. It was her day off, and she was going there to see an exhibition called Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art. She had just arrived in London on a coach from Oxford and was run over by a bus outside Victoria Station. This was on a Friday morning in early May.
A Grimm history

Nov 14, 2024 | wng.org | Micah Mattix

The Brothers Grimm are the world’s most famous folklorists. Their Children’s and Household Tales never sold well during their lifetimes, but it made them—not Martin Luther or Franz Kafka—the most widely translated German authors of all time. It contains those tales we all know so well (or think we do)—“Snow White,” “Cinderella,” and “Rapunzel”—as well as lesser-known ones like “The Hand With a Knife,” about a girl who cuts peat with a magic knife.
Classes, Clubs, and Pubs: The World of C.S. Lewis

Aug 24, 2024 | freebeacon.com | Micah Mattix

It is not wrong to say that America made C.S. Lewis. Lewis’s 1942 book The Screwtape Letters was popular in Britain but was initially rejected by American publishers until Macmillan took a chance on it in 1943. It was a huge success. Macmillan quickly brought out his The Problem of Pain and The Case for Christianity (collecting Lewis’s popular BBC talks), as well as his sci-fi novel Out of the Silent Planet. Lewis was put on the cover of Time in 1947.
Classes, Clubs, and Pubs: The World of C.S. Lewis

Aug 24, 2024 | conservativereview.com | Micah Mattix
Winners of the Inaugural First Things Poetry Prize | Micah Mattix

Aug 18, 2024 | firstthings.com | Micah Mattix

We are pleased to announce that the winner of the inaugural First Things Poetry Prize is Josiah A. R. Cox for his poem “Two Owls.” Amit Majmudar, one of the judges for this competition, called it a “sonically and symbolically” rich poem that investigates both “predatory sight and visionary insight” in the figure of owls at night. Cox is from Kansas City, Missouri. He received an MAR from Yale Divinity School and an MFA from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.