Category Archives: books poetry lit

YA Book Review: Airhead by Meg Cabot

books poetry lit October 21, 2014 Leave a comment

airheadmegcabotbookcover

Airhead, Meg Cabot

HATED this book. One of the most sexist narratives I’ve ever read, and from a woman, to boot.

Emerson Watts is comfortable in her own skin. She loves video games, medical documentaries, and hanging out with her equally nerdy best friend Christopher, whom she only wishes would see her as a girl instead of his asexual buddy. Until a bizarre accident makes her a participant in a brain transplant meant to save her life, in which she’s given the body – and forced to take over the identity – of a world-famous teen supermodel.

………….
………….

Leaving the sheer bloody ludicrousness of the plot aside, the message this book is sending – to teen girls no less – is that it’s not okay or enough to just have interests and be yourself and have nerdy interests (interests which in real life would make you totally hot to a lot of guys, something the book was conspicuously silent on – do you know how many guys would love a woman who plays video games? A LOT). You can’t *just* be smart and have hobbies and your own personality – you must ALSO have the body of a supermodel and a smile that turns virtually every guy who sees into jelly.

Because at the end of the day, why settle for being yourself? When you can be smart, nerdy, AND hot? Thus fulfilling every male fantasy ever??? Seriously if Cabot had created a female character with men in mind she couldn’t have done a better job. Em in this novel becomes the teenage epitome of Gillian Flynn’s accurately-sketched, terrible Cool Girl in Gone Girl. The representation of Male Desire and its supremacy in culture and in narrative.

I HATED this novel with every fiber of my literature-loving, chick-lit-loving, feminist body. Excuse me while I go read some Kafka, *anything,* to get this taste out of my mouth.

P.S. Emerson – or rather her body – expires when a TV falls on her. I’m not making this stuff up, folks. 

P.P.S. The fact that there are two more books in this series makes me want to enlist The Bride (see Kill Bill if you haven’t seen it yet y’all) to track Cabot down and put the fear of woman into her so she never writes such a book again. I’ve read and liked/loved a lot of Cabot. This, is unworthy of her.

Separate Beds: Short Fiction

books poetry lit October 20, 2014 Leave a comment

If all short stories had the fierce, ferocious immediacy of Jahla Seppanen’s, I’d read a lot more short stories.

“I don’t miss her as I thought I would. Sure, at night, but what’s night without some loneliness. Even when we were married I would wake up, her on the far side of the bed and me on the other, and I would feel lonely although she was close. My parents slept in separate beds. They said it helped parry feelings of being unwanted. When they kissed in the morning over coffee and eggs, it was a real kiss. Not an afterthought to the seven o’clock alarm. Not a simple recognition of the other’s being. A real kiss.

The separation began when I suggested spending a month in Morocco.”

Read more at Turk’s Head Review

Poetry: Mornings

books poetry lit October 17, 2014 Leave a comment

She would have cooked
his breakfast, eggs sunny-side up,
runny the way he liked them,
strong boiled coffee poured
and waiting, better than the diner.
But before the train screaming
through tunnels, his windowless office,
the idiots he had to “sir,”
he needed a space without her
or his children, so he dressed
in a crack of light from the bathroom,
held his shoes by two fingers,
and left them sleeping. That walk

to the diner was his time

Read more at Burnt District

-Susan Aizenberg

Thank you to Linebreak for publishing one of my poems!

books poetry lit October 15, 2014 Comments: 2

linebreak poem claire hellar

Lovely followers, I’m so excited to say that Linebreak, one of my very favorite poetry publications, picked up one of my poems, “Kitchen Ode”! Please read below and share on Facebook/Twitter if so inclined! (There are handy links at the bottom of the page)

Read or listen to “Kitchen Ode”  on Linebreak

Book Review: The Emperor’s Blades, plus Waiting on Wednesday Book Meme

books poetry lit October 15, 2014 Leave a comment

New WoWWaiting on Wednesday is a weekly book meme hosted by Breaking the Spine in which bloggers post about an upcoming book they’re eagerly waiting for.

I’ve been eagerly anticipating Ashley Weaver’s Murder at the Brightwell, which sounds like the most delicious murder mystery ever, a beautiful cocktail of romance, 30’s beachy glamour, and murder, but since it came out yesterday (I have already requested it at the library), it would be cheating to include it. So I’ll go with my other choice, the second book in Brian Stavely’s Chronicles of the Unhewn Throne, The Providence of Fire.

the emperor's blades book coverThe first book in the Unhewn Series, The Emperor’s Blades, was rich, fast-paced, and immensely satisfying – it did a brilliant job of laying out three, strong personalities and their very different worlds, and then culminating them at the end. It was largely the tale of hot-headed yet brilliant Valyn, the emperor’s son who has been in training his whole life as one of the Emperor’s Blades, warrior-assassins who are put through years of intensive, regimented training in all kinds of weaponry as well as stealth tactics, survival, etc. Valyn is already a gifted, deadly force at the beginning of the novel, and only grows as it goes on, also stepping for the first time into a leadership position he’ll have to learn how to exercise.

A world away, his brother Kaden, the heir to the throne, is a pupil at a remote monastery where he learns what seems to him esoteric and useless skills – which might one day save his life.

Continue reading →

Poetry: Boat

books poetry lit October 14, 2014 Leave a comment

My son sleeps
the way a boat
comes free—

ropes thrown back
on deck, and the soft hands
of the water all around.

-Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco, Star 82 Review

Poetry: Orderly Dispersal

books poetry lit October 13, 2014 Leave a comment

I’m asking you now in my calmest voice, my voice of patience and maintenance and strength, to rise slowly from your seats and turn to face the nearest aisle. The person in front of you is moving deliberately and efficiently. Put your trust in that person’s control of his or her impulses to rush or push or trample the persons between him or her and the ultimate goal of the exit just as you exercise your power over your own impulses to act in the same way.

Listen to the tone of calm in my voice. Do not worry. Relax the muscles in your shoulders. Lift your feet one at a time, move each a few inches forward and put it back down with plenty of clearance for the shoes and feet of the person in front of you who is proceeding in the same measured way out of the row of seats to the aisle and on toward the ultimate goal of the exit.

Read more

-Jesse Minkert, Paper Nautilus

 

Favorite Fictional ‘Boys-Next-Door’

books poetry lit, this & that October 12, 2014 Comments: 4

anne+green+gables1. Gilbert Blythe, Anne of Green Gables series. Gilbert Blythe doesn’t literally live next door, but he’s exactly the type – he grows up with you, teases and pulls your pigtails when you’re younger, than turns into a kind, sweet friend, then a smoldering romantic interest. Mostly though, he’s just that sweet, dependable, good-looking guy next door that you’ve always taken for granted and one day fall for.

Drug of choise: Watch webseries Green Gables, which is utterly dull for most of its run but sparkles right up with the introduction of Gilbert Blythe offering warm coverings in the rain. See also Staircase Wit’s Top Ten Most Romantic Anne Shirley and Gilbert Blythe Moments.

lola-boy-next-door2. Cricket, Lola and the Boy Next Door. In Stephanie Perkin’s delightful second novel in her young adult series, Cricket literally lives across the street from strong-willed aspiring clothing designer Lola. The two kind of grow up together, then start to fall in love, have a fight, and Cricket moves away…until he comes back in Lola’s senior year of high school. Lola’s first love now inhabits the balcony across from hers. Cricket is a family friend, loved by her parents, and creative like her – his hobby is mechanical inventions made of metal and wood. Funny, supportive, and vulnerable, he’s very much a boy next door.

I know there are more, but most fictional heroes frankly fall into the snarky, aloof mold or the icy arrogant, combative mold. Who are your favorite boy-next-door figures?

Poetry: What Happens Happens in the Body

books poetry lit October 11, 2014 Leave a comment

You are not a windchime. You feel this
when it’s ten below and the window
falls out of the storm door and though
there is another door behind that one—

because this is the way with storm doors:
they protect—soon enough you have to
replace the strip of framing, you have to
admit you threw out when it fell out

in July as if it were never important.
It was. It was always coming for you,
this or that bit of significant plastic
dislodged by one predictable destructive

action. Cue sharp ice forming on a super-
efficient furnace exhaust: it’s exactly what
they kept saying about the sublime: how
it happens in the body and it hurts.

-Sarah Barber, Word Riot

Reading Kierkegaard at the Bar

books poetry lit October 9, 2014 Leave a comment

I am practicing exercises in futility.
I call it hope.

At the bottom of this beer,
drunk becomes Enlightenment.
It will this time.
The stool will stop quivering
rippling tsunamis to my thighs.

The ice cubes invited themselves
to this party, but they can’t tell
a good lie. They look like a priest
I once knew.

The corners of the bar look like God
right angle perfection. My fingers,
bell curve or parabola
depending on the glass. Mismatched.

There is an infinite qualitative difference
between the desire to sit on a bar stool
and the feeling of your ass two hours later.

I am as lucid as the waitress’s open pockets.
I have exact change. I know grace
when it catches me by the throat
and refuses to kill me. This is why
I come to the bar. Alone.

I have all the fear and trembling
and drowning has never been
so difficult. The floor, the only
leap of faith I cannot make.

I found God in apron pockets. Not hers.
Never looked, just felt. Just fought the urge
to hide behind the potted palm
beside the ladies’ room all night,

sipping the glass half-full
tucked between the corner
and the plant.

-Hilary Kobernick, Paper Nautilus