Former Alaskan poet Laureate Tom Sexton’s latest volume of poetry is “Cummiskey Alley.” The collection is named after Lowell’s first Irishman, Hugh Cummiskey, who walked from Boston to Lowell with a group of Irish laborers. Cummiskey and many other Irish labors dug miles of canals in Lowell, and helped birth…
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Home for the Holidays: Cowboy Christmas By Henri Marchand “The memories of childhood have no order, and no end,” wrote Dylan Thomas in Reminiscences of Childhood. A popular holiday song claims that, “there’s no place like home for the holidays.” These lines come to mind as my family prepares to…
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BÉBÉ and Me by Louise Peloquin My mother lost her first child, a girl. Two years later, I showed up at Saint Joseph’s Hospital, another girl. Both my parents were thrilled with their strong, healthy child and gender didn’t weigh in on their love at first sight. The little girl…
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Lowell City Walk Sketch: Lord Overpass By George Chigas My favorite city walk these days is to leave my apartment on Middle Street, walk up Central, turn right on Jackson and cut through the Justice Center to see the current progress on the Lord Overpass project. During the last few…
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Congratulations and thanks to UMass Lowell for erecting four wayside exhibit panels about Lowell’s Little Canada neighborhood. I believe this project is part of the remediation agreement that allowed the demolition of the two surviving triple-decker residences that stood on Pawtucket Street at the Howe Bridge (photo below). The Geography…
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Although I was born in Lowell (est. 1826), in the Centralville section, I grew up in Dracut (est. 1701) from the age of two through my college years. My neighborhood’s colonial-era name was New Boston Village, but that wasn’t used when I was there. We didn’t have a name for…
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Tom Sexton is the author of Cummiskey Alley: New and Selected Lowell Poems, which will be published by Loom Press next week. To order, please visit www.loompress.com Autumn by Tom Sexton What is it about a late autumn afternoon with birch and sumac leaves drifting down, that…
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Spurred by our Texas friend Frank Wagner’s essay about meeting Patti Smith in the late 1970s, an encounter with a cranky, thirty-something, tightly wound artist, we’re reprising this review-essay about Patti Smith’s most recent book, Year of the Monkey, just out in paperback. Note that former Lowell Sun journalists Nancye…
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In the following chapter from his urban theory book Exploring the Production of Urban Space, author Michael Leary-Owhin visited Lowell and wrote about the creation of Boarding House Park. Lowell: Producing Urban Public Space and City Transformation By Micheal Leary-Owhin … countries in the throes of rapid development blithely destroy…
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