Category Archives: books poetry lit

Book Review: Unlocking the Air and Other Stories by Ursula K. LeGuin

books poetry lit June 26, 2014 Leave a comment

UnlockingTheAir

 

Unlocking the Air and Other Stories

I read only three of these stories and couldn’t finish. There’s an emotional turbulence running through each of these stories that reminds me of both A.S. Byatt and Ray Bradbury, and left me with a profound sense of unease. A strangeness haunts these stories, both metaphorical – as in the tale of a miniature, almost-but-not-quite dollhouse a professor builds as a stress reliever (a microcosm of his world) – and literal, as in the tale of a family who wakes up one day to find their water running red. This is Ursula K. LeGuin at her most skilled – she writes with every bit of A.S. Byatt’s erudite passion about people, intellectual choices, selfishness, and how said choices lead people inevitably into various social and economic classes, where they remain for the rest of their lives. The stories are impressive, literary, and gripping. But I did not like them. The effect they left was both unpleasant and strong, and I’ve found life to be too short to spend my time on that. I am putting this down without regret.

Nearing Lazarus’ Tomb

books poetry lit June 25, 2014 Comments: 2

He’d seen it all. Swathes of nothingness
spun into stars, the slapping of the first fin onto land,
and now these creatures, by far the cleverest
and the saddest—though listing it that way
felt faulty, as if all happenings unfurled inch by inch
instead of blooming in one cacophony,
the apple crumpling just outside the city walls.

And it wasn’t even an apple, or fig,
or pomegranate glinting with infernal seeds,
though he’d accommodate their legends,
accept provisional truths, the same way they worked
with the earth un-sphered and stilled
in leaf-thin sketch.
To overlook
imprecision in the premises, concede
to the limits of both flesh and paper,
was what it meant to translate, as to love.
Which struck him as strange pottery:
roll everything that’s been into a coil
and score it with each day; cram self into cage
of clay and bone; daub their closed eyes in slip
and wait for it to flake off to new sight. It seemed to take
what they called a lifetime.

But they didn’t have that, not right here,
beside the village known as House-of-Misery
whose people rent their clothes. Before he even spoke
Mary’s tears were falling warm onto his feet,
carving clear trails through the coat of dust.

If you had been here. He stood
enveloped in the sound of all their moans,
entangled in her locks of dampening hair.
If you had been here. All grief’s audacity
pitched in her splintering voice, she raised her head
to look at him, and in her water-darkened eyes
he who’d seen all things felt this:
pain’s veil dividing now from everything
that is not-now. And he began to weep.

-Laura Wang, Christian Century

Book Review: A Wallflower Christmas by Lisa Kleypas

books poetry lit June 23, 2014 Leave a comment

wallflower christmas

You, me, chiclit…and how I stopped reading chic lit.

Seriously, after reading this over the weekend, I think I may have officially outgrown adult romance.

A Wallflower Christmas

I have generally very positive feelings about Lisa Kleypas. I’ve read quite a few of her books in the past (when I was still reading chic-lit) and while her books were a little too sex-drenched they were always light, breezy, witty, with some good touches of emotional depth and genuine affection and convincing compatibility between the leads.

This? Is tripe dressed up in pretty clothes. First off, notorious bachelor Rafe Bowman, just-arrived in London to have an arranged marriage with a pretty noblewoman, meets, and instantly finds insanely sexy, the average-looking Hannah, his intended’s paid companion.

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Break

books poetry lit June 22, 2014 Leave a comment

We put the puzzle together piece
by piece, loving how one curved
notch fits so sweetly with another.
A yellow smudge becomes
the brush of a broom, and two blue arms
fill in the last of the sky.
We patch together porch swings and autumn
trees, matching gold to gold. We hold
the eyes of deer in our palms, a pair
of brown shoes. We do this as the child
circles her room, impatient
with her blossoming, tired
of the neat house, the made bed,
the good food. We let her brood
as we shuffle through the pieces,
setting each one into place with a satisfied
tap, our backs turned for a few hours
to a world that is crumbling, a sky
that is falling, the pieces
we are required to return to.

-Dorianne Laux, Poetry 180

The Light Keeper

books poetry lit June 16, 2014 Leave a comment

A night without ships. Foghorns called into walled cloud, and you

still alive, drawn to the light as if it were a fire kept by monks,

darkness once crusted with stars, but now death-dark as you sail inward.

Through wild gorse and sea wrack, through heather and torn wool

you ran, pulling me by the hand, so I might see this for once in my life:

the spin and spin of light, the whirring of it, light in search of the lost,

there since the era of fire, era of candles and hollow-wick lamps,

whale oil and solid wick, colza and lard, kerosene and carbide,

the signal fires lighted on this perilous coast in the Tower of Hook.

You say to me stay awake, be like the lensmaker who died with his

lungs full of glass, be the yew in blossom when bees swarm, be

their amber cathedral and even the ghosts of Cistercians will be kind to you.

In a certain light as after rain, in pearled clouds or the water beyond,

seen or sensed water, sea or lake, you would stop still and gaze out

for a long time. Also when fireflies opened and closed in the pines,

and a star appeared, our only heaven. You taught me to live like this.

That after death it would be as it was before we were born. Nothing

to be afraid. Nothing but happiness as unbearable as the dread

from which it comes. Go toward the light always, be without ships.

-Carolyn Forche, Santa Clara Review, also published in The New Yorker

The Little Mermaid, Original Quotes with Illustrations by Natalie Akimova

art & illustration, books poetry lit June 7, 2014 Leave a comment

b5847b38241d9ef7b5a7055a1e17a5ab

Art by the incredibly gifted Natalie Akimova; text from the original story by Hans Christian Andersen.

“Far out in the ocean, where the water is as blue as the prettiest cornflower, and as clear as crystal, it is very, very deep; so deep, indeed, that no cable could fathom it: many church steeples, piled one upon another, would not reach from the ground beneath to the surface of the water above. There dwell the Sea King and his subjects. We must not imagine that there is nothing at the bottom of the sea but bare yellow sand. No, indeed; the most singular flowers and plants grow there; the leaves and stems of which are so pliant, that the slightest agitation of the water causes them to stir as if they had life. Fishes, both large and small, glide between the branches, as birds fly among the trees here upon land. In the deepest spot of all, stands the castle of the Sea King. Its walls are built of coral, and the long, gothic windows are of the clearest amber. The roof is formed of shells, that open and close as the water flows over them. Their appearance is very beautiful, for in each lies a glittering pearl, which would be fit for the diadem of a queen.”

littlemermaid

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Witness

books poetry lit June 5, 2014 Leave a comment

I drove on moun­tain roads so long that night
the world split off into one dark bend
always slink­ing past my pool of light
and a wisp of me behind the wheel to tend

to what there was to see, which wasn’t much:
the fire­works empo­ri­ums, a sign
here and there—hell is real and such,
cows clumped, trees car­tooned by kudzu vine

until, as in a dream, this: spun
my way, a jeep just flipped, its smashed glass
glint­ing, pas­sen­gers crawl­ing out stunned.
Cicadas writhing up from warm dirt in May,

I thought, and so I slowed then drove on by.
Fine, I tell myself, think­ing back, they were fine.

-Amy Arthur, Birmingham Poetry Review

All Rainbow Rowell Up in Here

books poetry lit June 4, 2014 Leave a comment

XTINEMay aka Christine, one of the most popular book vloggers on Youtube, has a hilarious and spot-on discussion of Attachments, Rainbow Rowell’s first (and my least favorite of her books).

Speaking of Rainbow Rowell….I am very late with this but she’s writing a graphic novel!!!!

I Love You

books poetry lit May 29, 2014 Leave a comment

Early on, I noticed that you always say it
to each of your children
as you are getting off the phone with them
just as you never fail to say it
to me whenever we arrive at the end of a call.

It’s all new to this only child
I never heard my parents say it,
at least not on such a regular basis,
nor did it ever occur to me to miss it.
To say I love you pretty much every day

would have seemed strangely obvious,
like saying I’m looking at you
when you are standing there looking at someone.
If my parents had started saying it
a lot, I would have started to worry about them.

O course, I always like hearing it from you.
That is never a cause for concern,
The problem is I now find myself saying it back
if only because just saying good-bye
then hanging up would make me seem discourteous.

But like Bartleby, I would prefer not to
say it so often, would prefer instead to save it
for special occasions, like shouting it out as I leaped
into the red mouth of the volcano
with you standing helplessly on the smoking rim,

or while we are desperately clasping hands
before our plane plunges in the Gulf of Mexico,
which are only two of the examples I had in mind,
But enough, as it turns out, to make me
want to say it to you right now.

and what better place than in the final couplet
of a poem where, as every student know, it really counts.

-Billy Collins

Yes & No

books poetry lit May 11, 2014 Leave a comment

Yes to the wooden giraffe airmailed from Arizona

with a note from your mother-in-law saying no more

excuses to sleep unprotected by your spirit animal,

but no to a new kind of insomnia. Yes to most -philias

not in the dictionary, like car washes in the rain

and bakeries on fire, but no no no to looking at old photos

with a bottle of Maker’s. Yes to your wife drinking

beer in the shower, but don’t hop in and join her,

let her have this moment beautifully wet and alone,

you’re here in the kitchen sautéing spinach and garlic

if she needs you. No to speed limit signs graffitied

but yes to climbing the overpass at night to tell the world

exactly the year that you loved her

Read the rest at H_NGN_M

This poem by Justin Bigos rocked my world and will rock yours.