Lex Enrico Santí, LCSW, PLLC - A Key Therapy Three Poems from 2004 Plum Ruby Review, Summer Issue In the summer of 2004, I published three poems in Plum Ruby Review . I was living in Washington, DC, on the edge of entering an MFA program, politically charged, aesthetically restless, and deeply interested in how language could stretch—visually, ethically, bodily. These poems come from a time when I was less concerned with coherence and more interested in pressure : how an imag

Lex E Santí, LCSW, MFA – Founder, A Key Therapy LCSW, PLLC Every few years, the federal government finds a new way to remind us that the “helping professions” aren’t actually meant to be helped. The newest example is the U.S. Department of Education’s proposal to reclassify certain master’s programs — education, nursing, public health, social work — so that they are no longer considered “professional degrees” for federal student loan purposes. The Department of Education insi

Lex Enrico Santí, LCSW, MFA Books have been my most loyal companions. I’ve been reading since I was old enough to understand that the world was bigger than my family, bigger than the town where I grew up, bigger even than the United States. Books were my way out and my way in. They taught me how to live, how to argue, how to be tender. They’ve never once ghosted me, though I’ve been guilty of ignoring them. Below are fifteen that shaped me. Not in some linear list, not as a c