Haitian Relief: Shelter is Crucial, Underfunded

As if things couldn't get any worse for Haiti, 1.2 million people are now homeless, living in crowded makeshift open-air "spontaneous settlements" without shelter beyond maybe a bedsheet. The rainy season is on its way. It's hard to imagine the misery – no protection from the elements, no sanitation--to say nothing of the risks of epidemic disease.

While the UN humanitarian response has succeeded in filling 107% of requested funds for health, a major achievement, only 27% of funds requested for shelter needs have been donated so far. Some causes may just be sexier than others – but that doesn't mean they're less essential.

Mark Leon Goldberg has the details at UNdispatch, including information on how to donate ( it's about two-thirds down the page). The rains start in May, so if you were thinking it's maybe time to make (another) donation to Haitian relief, you're right.
A tarp that can shelter a family of 5 costs only $15; a shelter kit costs around $30.

Originally published in "And Another Thing."

Exchange: Katha Pollitt and Alexander Cockburn on the Hispanic Crime Rate

Pollitt spars with fellow Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn over his citation of "groundbreaking research" about the Hispanic crime rate in America. Read about it here.

New Nation Column: "What Ever Happened to Candidate Obama?"

Read Pollitt's latest column here.

Pollitt on American Patriotism in Dissent Magazine

Read Katha Pollitt's thoughts about the dark side of American patriotism in the Winter 2010 issue of Dissent.

New Nation Column: "Focus on the Fetus"

Read Pollitt's latest column here.

Help Haiti: Donate to a Grassroots Healthcare Organization

If you've been wondering how and where to donate to Haiti relief work, have meant to give but haven't yet done so, have given already but can give more, you can't do better than give to Partners in Health. PIH, founded by Paul Farmer, has worked in Haiti for 25 years building a grassroots healthcare organization that has become a model for healthcare for the poor in the developing world. PIH knows the people and the culture and how to get things done. Indeed, right now its hospital and clinics are among the few still standing. Moreover, PIH will still be in Haiti when the crisis is over and the media spotlight has moved on.

Donate here: Stand With Haiti -- Partners In Health

New Nation Column: "Free Nazia Quazi"

Nazia Quazi, a dual Canadian-Indian citizen, has been held in Saudi Arabia for two years against her will because her male guardian won't give his permission for her to leave. The Canadian Embassy in Riyadh doesn't want to become involved in what it views as a Muslim family dispute. This is the second time in the past year that Canada refused to acknowledge the basic human rights of one of its female citizens trapped in Saudi Arabia. Read more here.

New Nation Column: "The Decade for Women: Forward, Backward, Sideways?"

Read Pollitt's review of how American women have fared during the previous decade here.

The Mind-Body Problem Reviewed in the New York Times' Sunday Book Review

Eric McHenry reviewed Pollitt's The Mind-Body Problem in this week's Sunday Book Review for the New York Times:

“Everywhere I look I see my fate,” Pollitt writes, and she’s not kidding. Studying the ragtag riders on a New York subway at night, she thinks “of Xerxes, how he reviewed his troops / and wept to think that . . . / not one would be alive in a hundred years.” The kitschy collectibles in a schoolyard rummage sale have crossed decades to deliver the message “that we lose even what we never had.” “The Mind-Body Problem,” Pollitt’s second collection of poems (and her first in close to 30 years), is a book consumed not so much with mortality as with transience, of which mortality is one aspect. Another is the way our most casual choices come to define us, a process Pollitt likes to enact by letting casual-seeming analogies take over whole poems. “Death can’t help but look friendly / when all your friends live there,” she writes in “Old,” “while more and more / each day’s like a smoky party / where the music hurts and strangers insist that they know you.” In the ­poem’s final lines you’re still at that awful party, checking your watch and saying “to no one in particular, / If you don’t mind, I think I’ll go home now.” Pollitt knows how to pace a poem — where it ought to turn, tense and relax. She knows how many specifics she needs to save up in order to afford an abstraction, and how to cinch off a free-verse lyric with pentametrical certainty: “wrapped in white tissue paper, like a torch”; “the silent, bright elms burn themselves away.” A few of the poems feel pat and rhetorical (Pollitt, a longtime columnist for The Nation, is persuasive for a living). But “The Mind-Body Problem” is an affecting and satisfying book.

Pollitt Reviews J.M. Coetzee's "Summertime" in the New York Times

Check out Katha Pollitt's New York Times review of J.M. Coetzee's last novel, Summertime. Presented as the author's autobiography, the book is in fact a work of fiction, written in present tense and narrated by a third-person interviewer. Read the full review here.

An excerpt:

It’s tempting to see “Summertime” as Mr. Coetzee’s attempt to answer critics’ charges of misogyny by offering a quartet of humorous, mature, strong female characters who haven’t much use for their gloomy, self-absorbed author. One can also see them as resistant muses who upstage the writer by putting themselves at the center of a story that is supposed to be, after all, about him. Readers alert to writerly games about art and reality, however, will note that even if they are modeled after actual people, Julia and the rest are literary characters, the inventions of the novelist, who imagined for them the very qualities they think he does not possess.

New Nation Column: Time to Get Out Those Checkbooks

A sampling from Pollitt's newest Nation column of the excellent groups who could use your support during the New Year:

(Scan the full list here and even more ideas here)

1. Native American Women's Health Education Resource Center. Co-founded by Charon Asetoyer, who did so much to defeat South Dakota's proposed abortion ban (twice!), this project of the Native American Community Board helps women and children on or near the Yankton Sioux reservation. nativeshop.org

2. Gulf Region Advocacy Center. This Houston-based group provides free legal help to indigent capital defendants in execution-happy Texas. gracelaw.org

3. Freedom From Religion Foundation. If you have had it up to here with faith-based initiatives, creationism and clerical prying into our private lives, FFRF is the organization for you. ffrf.org

4. Bahia Street. Founded by a Brazilian sociologist and an American anthropologist, this group helps girls from the slums of Salvador, Brazil, with education, healthcare, food and counseling to help them break out of the cycle of poverty and violence. bahiastreet.org

5. WAW/AWF. More troops are not going to help Afghan women become literate or self-supporting or safe from violence. That takes local knowledge and hands-on involvement. Women for Afghan Women, on whose advisory board I serve, runs women's shelters in Kabul and other cities, plus a home for the children of women in prison. womenforafghanwomen.org.

Poem Featured on Poetry Society of America's Website

Pollitt's poem "Lunaria," from The Mind-Body Problem is featured on the Poetry Society of America website.

New Nation Column: "Last Column About Sarah Palin -- Ever"

Read Pollitt's latest column here.

The Mind-Body Problem Reviewed in Rattle: Poetry for the 21st Century

Check out this wonderful review of The Mind-Body Problem from the Rattle.com blog.

New Nation Column: "Whose Team Is It, Anyway?"

The Stupak-Pitts amendment bans abortions for women enrolled in federally-subsidized health insurance. Read Pollitt's thoughts here.