Remarkably, Lucinda seems both composition exercise and confession (“once again the text finds itself / helplessly stuck between two distinct / critical foci, pinioned”), as unclassifiable and as exciting as the more than 200-year-old book that inspired it.
Sometimes, place is an obvious theme or motif in a work, while other times it informs a work in a subtler but still necessary way.
In this fantastic collection what is evident from the get-go is that the speaker is most definitely a daughter. She is also a wife, a mother, a woman of the deep heart and spirit. Reckless? No. Or, yes, if the heart is a reckless landscape of emotive temperaments, shifts, mannerisms, funky phantoms of hipness and insight, then, yes, reckless.
A new kind of writing about motherhood may be emerging. Rachel Zucker’s and Arielle Greenberg’s Home/Birth, Brenda Shaughnessy’s Our Andromeda, Eula Biss’s On Immunity, and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, for example, are conscious in a contemporary way about new possibilities of childbearing and parenting, about choices and agency, yet also connect to tradition. Robyn Schiff’s new book adds another dimension to this emergent canon by summoning the uncanny.
William Wenthe’s latest collection, God’s Foolishness (winner of the L.E. Phillabaum Poetry Award with LSU Press), begins in mid-August, weighted with back to school and the anticipation for new opportunities . . . but also the dissatisfaction of unfulfilled goals.
For August, I read three chapbooks that dealt with ideas of past, present, and future in both overlapping and contrasting ways. They also each somehow dealt with ideas of spaces that became place for the writers, though sometimes these places were more about time than physical geography.
Jana Prikryl’s The After Party is one of those rare debut volumes, like Stevens’s Harmonium, in which we meet an already fully-inhabited voice. In some such cases, much unforeseeable development may be in store, as with Graham’s Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts; sometimes, as with Delmore Schwartz’s In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, the debut may be almost the whole story. Predictions are futile. A reader does feel, though, that a new town has appeared on the map.
When I arrived in Florence for an extended trip, I was determined not to look like a tourist. I wanted to carry a leather-bound notebook and sit at sidewalk cafes drinking cappuccinos and looking thoughtful. Mostly, I wanted to read The Decameron and the last two books of The Divine Comedy with a Tuscan backdrop.
In “Trances of the Blast,” the poem from the book by the same name, Mary Ruefle begins with a question and answer: “What is the code for happiness?/Blackberries forever.”
Although the book—Trances of the Blast—came out several years ago, this particular line has haunted me ever since.
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