forty-two: august 2005
8.13.2005 saturday
Art and Lies by Jeanette Winterson
Three voices: an ineffectual priest/doctor, a mad painter and the
disembodied voice of an ancient poet converse with themselves, a
harlot and a deaf woman who responds only with "So right, so true."
exploring the unnamable disease of life in modern times.
-Rick
8.12.2005 friday
The Governor's Daughter by Paule Constant Begins in glorious excess, as the
daughter acquires a memory-- and an interiority, and a subjectivity--the moment she
steps into the boat that will take her to the prison her father governs. Ends in
diminished originality: jungles, disease, the colonial other.
-Diana
8.11.2005 thursday
The Red Gaze by Barbara Guest
Of course the poems are paintings themselves, of course whole field of page becomes another field entirely, with birds. It is natural to be silent inside a painting. The titles are writ big but it feels like a longpoem with interruptions, movements.
-Jen
8.10.2005 wednesday
Heart Into Soil by Xue Di, Translated by Keith Waldrop and Wang Ping
Nature is natural except/especially/suddenly: your wife, a fox, reaches into your chest, you smell a horse’s groin in moonlight. Without end punctuation, next line capitalizes itself – sometimes I read interruption, sometimes I’m left curious. Nature, a Van Gogh, hurts hard all around.
-Jen
8.9.2005 tuesday
You Can Tell The Horse Anything by Mary A. Koncel
“Of course, you stop. Imagine, though, if you didn’t.” A discomforting and wise collection of prose poems involving horses, babies, and men from Ohio who go too far. Endings, like individuals, become weightier as they accumulate. At last they hang over you.
-Jen
8.8.2005 monday
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
A narrative of a small man, a saint of true American ideals, with a
booming voice: Owen who removes arms from objects in effigy. The
narrator: an ex-patriot in Canada who hates America for killing in
itself all that could redeem it.
-Rick
8.7.2005 sunday
The Living by Annie Dillard
Washington before it was Washington, when people died of sore throats and logjams. The perfect rhythm of each sentence helps you believe it. Children live in birdhouses on the beach, kill dinner. The living cannot possibly understand what it means to die.
-Jen
8.6.2005 saturday
Truth and Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett
Tells the story of the author’s stormy and genuine friendship with Lucy Grealy, author of Autobiography of a Face, an entirely familiar story which is nonetheless entirely moving in its particularities: what does it mean to be a friend, what severs it.
-Jen
8.5.2005 friday
The Patron Saint of Liars by Ann Patchett
The revolution of narrators creates a sense of loss and inevitability; in a story of giving-away, the former is fitting, the latter makes me want to fool with its chronology. What if we moved from the baby backwards? Which is the mystery.
-Jen
8.4.2005 thursday
Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir by Susanne Antonetta
Poisoned, almost inarguably, by a New Jersey childhood (chemical waste; nuclear plumes; a cramped family ethos), Antonetta has two wombs, no thyroid, and manic depression. Her polemic pirouettes off the unloving, public and private, in lovely, angry arcs. What's to be done?
-Erika
8.3.2005 wednesday
The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells
Not about science, not about hubris: It’s a Victorian horror story about the
death of God. Beast-men grovel before the cruel indifference of a mad
demiurge. Yahoos abound, but houynhnhms are nowhere to be found, neither on
Moreau’s island nor Queen Victoria’s.
-Brian
8.2.2005 tuesday
No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
Times they are a’changing, but it’s still hard to talk about good and evil in America without talking about guns. Sawedoff guns, silenced guns, hidden guns, the guns of the dead. The prose, not as poetic as other McCarthy, is mesmerizingly humored.
-Jen
8.1.2005 monday
Waiting: The True Confessions of a Waitress by Debra Ginsberg
True as can be, it loses momentum after the first 100 pages; by the end the language even seems unfocused. Even so, an interesting and funny look at human nature and social preconceptions about working, working class, class, transiency, how we grow.
-Jen
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