The English Roses One of the teachers there had described the girls as "The English Roses" which Madonna found "funny". She had already progressed with a few other stories but wanted to write about girls who always felt they did not have "enough". The death of Madonna's mother at an early age had always affected her, and her musical endeavors. So while developing Binah, she drew from her own experience of dealing with her mother's death. Like her, Binah kept a picture of her mother beside her bed. It was Madonna's "own personal experience and I needed to come up with things for
The Best American Poetry 2003 The Best American Poetry 2003 The Best American Poetry 2003, a volume in "The Best American Poetry series", was edited by David Lehman and by guest editor Yusef Komunyakaa. Ron Smith, reviewing the book in The Richmond Times-Dispatch, wrote that Galway Kinnell's "When the Towers Fell" is "often moving, even if it doesn't manage the fusion of Walt Whitman and T. S. Eliot it aims for." Another poem in the volume focusing on the effects of terrorism is Susan Dickman's "Skin". Smith thought the better poems in this edition were by Marilyn Nelson, Rodney Jones, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Tony Hoagland,