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Book Notes: on Slaveroad by John Edgar Wideman & Blood Test by Charles Baxter
“Even as one is struck by Wideman’s compulsive originality and freshness of expression, the reader isn’t allowed to settle into the comfort of morally-charged epiphanies.”
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“Virginia’s Room”
“Later he showed me how to move semi-paralyzed Tony from his wheelchair into the shower. Once you got him on his feet, he could stand firmly, but you had to pick up his stiff legs, one at a time, to get him into the tub.”
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“Good Girls, Good Mothers” & “Talking to Animals”
“… Mothers who married / before sex, who were taught nothing, / who knew little of the desire they saw floating // through the air like bubbles.”
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on Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton, edited by David Grundy & Lauri Scheyer
“His signature qualities: an interest in place, particularly contrasting the north and south; a self-deprecating but assertive speaker; and the use of rhythmic declarative statements strongly tied to the spoken word tradition.”
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“On Mothering, Mortality, and the Wankel T. rex” & “Telling the Bees”
“Easter morning, my sleeping teenager hushes the house, / the only child still here, and not a child. Too old / for the scrawl of wax crayon on shell, the patient perching / of bent copper handle into purple vinegar.”
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“Noontime” & “Junk Moon”
“At noon the church bells roll a hymn across our roofs. / ‘Misses the B flat minor,’ my neighbor complains, // Although I can’t hear the notes she hears …”
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“Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl”
“On the basement wall, top of the stairs, / they Scotch-taped my two crayoned drawings, / sprung alive when I flicked the lights on. // I hated them.”
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“Premeditatio Malorum”
“The old people dealing cards at the picnic table in porchlight — / a study in chatter and laughter and smoke, in yellow buglight and shadow …”
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“Four and a Half Years”
“And maybe one morning as you / inspect the lake outside your window, / a speck of that dust will lodge in your eye / and blur the pictures in their frames …”
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on A Line in the World, nonfiction by Dorte Nors, translated from the Danish by Caroline Wright
“… a masterpiece of place-based nonfiction with soothing, rhythmic sentences that mask the intrusive outside world like a white noise machine.”
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Letters to the Six Conservative Justices of the Supreme Court
“Dear Amy Coney Barrett, / Have you ever wept when someone you don’t know is kind to you? / The nurse who held my hand during my second abortion / said the quick loss of pregnancy hormones could have caused my weeping.”
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“Stop Bath” & “Lease”
“By seventeen, I knew to slide open a window without making a sound, how to run. Knew the right skirt, right angle to tilt my hip, right corner of Richmond Road to hitchhike on …”
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“Goodbye!”
“I have heard it is common for one to say a dying person’s name to them as they die, as if to call them back from their death. I wish I had never heard this.”
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“In My Other Life My Mother Fails” & “Dish Pigs”
“It’s what you call yourselves. I know / your skin is slick with fry oil, that the sour- / sponge smell in your hands lingers / even after you shower …”
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Twenty Poets Name Some New Favorites to Celebrate National Poetry Month
To celebrate National Poetry Month, I asked some friends to recommend a new or recent poetry title for the site’s readership. Many thanks to everyone for naming some favorites. RS *** Where X Marks the Spot by Bill Zavatsky (Hanging Loose Press, 2006) recommended by Michael Collier Unlike almost all the other New York School…