Month: May 2008
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Hood by Emma Donoghue Alyson Books, 1998 (originally Hamish Hamilton, 1995)
Cara Wall’s at the center of this book, except her presence is also an absence: she’s dead, so her voice isn’t here, only in snippets of remembered conversations, or imagined ones. Her girlfriend reading the death notice she’s put in the newspaper: W A L L, suddenly, Cara, beloved daughter of Ian and Winona. How…
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Talking in the Dark by Billy MerrellPUSH (Scholastic), 2003
This book’s a “poetry memoir,” and for that, I like it, though sometimes it feels like too much narrative, not enough image. Merrell writes about childhood, growing up, coming out, falling in and out of love; much of the book is about relationships, whether romantic or friendly or familial. I loved, in the first section,…
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Fidelity by Grace PaleyFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008
I like Grace Paley’s poems, how conversational they are, and how the best ones are full of a strong voice, or a sense of place. I like the way her New York poems, like the one on page 15, which begins “a new york city man is,” are perfectly observed city-moments, this one a man…
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Notes from the Air by John Ashberyecco (HarperCollins), 2007
“Vetiver,” the first poem in this collection, is one of my favorites: the slow grace of it: image, image, image, motion, the shift from the first stanza to the casual “Well, it just kind of came apart in the hand” of the second (p 3). “The Ice Storm” is a poem in which to feel…
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The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World by E.L. KonigsburgAtheneum Books for Young Readers, 2007
Reading a kids’ book after reading Proust felt funny, and I’m not sure I have anything to say about this book, other than that I read it in two days and stayed up past bedtime to finish it. Parts of this book—the mystery of it, the friendship between children and an eccentric old woman—reminded me…
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Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Prousttrans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence KilmartinRevised by D.J. EnrightModern Library, 2003 (this translation/edition originally Chatto & Windus, 1992)
I’ve been reading Within a Budding Grove slowly over the past few months, in ten-page snippets on the train, sprawled on the floor, stretched out in bed. What I like best in Proust are the lyrical passages, the images, full sentences like this one: I encountered no one at first but a footman who after…