ArteFact

Spanish singer and songwriter Rosalía released her fourth studio album, Lux, last fall. Lux is an ambitious work on two fronts: its sweeping spiritual theme, and the task of carrying that theme—the stories of female saints from across the world—to a modern audience. The sound alone is astonishing, in the best sort of way. Known for fusing flamenco, pop, reggaeton and hip-hop, Rosalía adds “classical” to the mix, recording with the London Symphony Orchestra to ultimately stunning effect. The blending of classical music into her already singular sound serves the album’s central claim—that what many might consider archaic is still relevant today.

All of us at Humanum Review would like to wish our readers a beautiful, joy-filled Christmas. May the Christ-Child bless you and yours! On this occasion we would like to offer you a gift of poetry from James Matthew Wilson's newest collection. 

The holy settlement of hours,
    Whose silence now descends like sleep,
    Who gathers us within its keep,
    And lets alone the hearth flames leap,
Affirms, for now, the only powers
Will be those we have claimed as ours...

Death has been a constant theme for Nick Cave over the six decades of his career. Take the vampiric look of the man himself: dressed in dark suits, shirt sans tie and open to mid-sternum, a build best described as skeletal, and long greased black hair coming out of a high-domed pallid pate. Cave’s appearance, combined with the distinctive baritone, and the backing of the Bad Seeds, makes for an emotive stage presence.

How far would you go to avoid pain? Would you let someone else die in order not to feel it? Of course you wouldn’t. No one with a half-functioning conscience would say that. But there are other ways we might use others to shield ourselves from what would hurt or cause discomfort. Whole industries are built around it, most recently, the artificial intelligence industry, which saves us from the ultimate discomfort that has afflicted human beings since our creation: having to think.

Commissioned for the opening of the 2024–25 Metropolitan Opera season, Grounded is an adaptation of George Brant’s widely acclaimed play of the same name. Created and composed by Jeanine Tesori, the opera was originally performed at the Washington National Opera in 2023 with Jess played by mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo and tenor Ben Bliss as Jess’s husband Eric. The opera serves as a powerful commentary on power and those who both wield it and are controlled by it in turn.

I. Thursday

The bucket in the laundry room
is stored up on the highest shelf
and labeled, in black marker, MOM—
with six kids lugging water out
to chickens, goats, and grazing sheep,
our buckets tend to disappear.

Tonight, my husband fills it up
with water, lukewarm like the baths
we used to draw for curling newborns
in our apartment’s kitchen sink...

We are hardwired to long for happiness. But is happiness something that wells up from within us or is it sourced externally, and if so, what are its terms? More to the point, who sets those terms, and what does the answer say about our ability to engineer our own happiness? Such are the questions I found myself asking as I watched the first season of Takehiro Kubota’s anime series My Happy Marriage.

The first time I went birdwatching with an avid birding enthusiast, my guidebook-knowledge transformed into an experience of joy and contemplation. A robin was no longer a familiar bird flittering in my backyard. I could distinguish it now by its song of rippling notes and clear, syllabic whistles. But it wasn’t an ornithologist who helped me notice these subtleties, simply a person in awe of birds who helped refine my senses.

As a child, I walked the streets of Rochester barefoot, my shirt torn and my face covered in soot. If I had read them, which I hadn’t, I could have echoed the words of Pip at the beginning of Great Expectations: “Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea.” However, unlike Pip, I didn’t know true poverty. When I paced the streets of Rochester without any shoes on, I was merely acting in the annual Dickens Festival...

A blessed Christmas and wonderful new year to all of our readers! We hope you enjoy this literary gift to you: a poem from Caitlin Smith Gilson's forthcoming collection, Luminous Darkness: The Passion of the Last Words (Wipf & Stock, 2025).

Long ago I was young
I did not know it then
But it was for you
To be this dying comet of love
Finishing my soul in you...