Monthly Archives: May 2012

May 31, 2012

Lesson 3: She is forever pursued by a host of vague adjectives ‘proper,’ ‘correct,’ ‘genteel,’ which hunt her to death…

By Cassie

Warning: This blog involves a pro/con list.

I also want to say that I do recommend this book because I could never not recommend Gemmell.  She’s done too much for me with her cheeky interviews, weekly columns, and the Bride.

PRO CON
It made me cry. It may ride on the side of making women objects. Just a bit, a tad.
It is the well-written 50 Shades of Grey — with a better ending. The ubiquitous “you,” or as you grammar types like: second person.
Voice. Repetition.
Australia (Bush Girl). England (Rain).
Nikki Gemmell Wasn’t as good as Bride Stripped Bare
Harper Collins (P.S.) First Section

Okay, now I will work my way through this.

UK Cover

American Cover (Someone needs to do a backstory on why these covers are so vastly different).

Bride Stripped Bare is one of my top five books ever.  If you are wondering about what to read next read Bride Stripped Bare.  It was the first book that made me pay attention to the publisher.  I loved that book and I loved it even more when Nikki Gemmell came out as the “anonymous” author because she’s Australian, and fiesty.

I have high expectations for all of her novels.  I wasn’t too keen on Shiver, but it was interesting because of the arctic.  Going into this new book, with the nude cuddle cover and the font very much like Bride Stripped Bare, I was thinking, once again Nikki Gemmell has hit rock solid gold rush.  While I think her voice is still the voice I loved in Bride Stripped Bare, I’m not sure this story gives the same resonance metaphorically, or the same want is driving the story.   In both books, a woman is finding herself, but in With My Body, Gemmell has made the main character a woman with life stages that I haven’t ever found myself wanting to have.  I’m sure I’ve been this woman in various stages, but I’m not sure I wanted to, which made this book a struggle to read.

Here are the phases of womanhood in book order.

  1. Upset Housewife
  2. Bush Girl
  3. Step-daughter
  4. Unwanted Child
  5. Flirt
  6. Seductress
  7. Naive pre-teen
  8. Sexual Deviant (society standards)
  9. Happy Housewife
  10. Happy Mother
  11. In-love woman with husband
  12. In-love woman with self

Obviously, those last four I would like to be, but the rest…not so much.

I think Gemmell has always done a good job of showing us the inner lives of humans.  There is someone in your cubicle row who goes home and uses the dotted tie around his collar in his bedroom exploration.  He is the Columbus of that room in 2012.  There is someone who is divorced, and lonely who cries not because the work day was especially hard but because the stove light is the only thing on when they come home.  There is a woman who wishes she wouldn’t see you at the school gate.  There is a woman dreading the next PTA meeting.  There is a family who can’t afford tissues for the classroom list, but will buy them anyway.

We are surrounding each other.

Gemmell’ Books

Gemmell shows that well in every novel she writes.  These inner-workings, not only in households, but in psyches.  She explores the dynamics of this woman’s life through a diary of thought.   My problem with the way she went about this is that silly little “you.”  While the you is a dang powerful force in short fiction, and should be taken very VERY lightly in any form, in a novel it’s kind of heavy.  Maybe not even kind of, maybe really heavy.

I’m not even sure we ever get a name for this woman we’re with throughout 462 pages.  She is called various names, “annoyance, mum, wife,” but I don’t think she’s ever given an actual name.  She is always, and forever will be, “you.”  I understand the idea behind this, make the reader feel as if they are the one in the story, they are living through this trauma, this boarding school, these artistic men who leave them broken and unhinged, but the “you” is simultaneously too far away, and too private.  I can’t scrape enough details from the page in the first section (pre-Tol) to really feel like I’m reading a grand novel, with a voice made of desire.

Gemmell is trying so hard to make this every woman, instead of just making it one woman who is relatable.  Then the voice is so private and so much Gemmell’s own writing voice that it’s too private – it leaves the reader out of the loop.  We are not the watcher of things happening, or the reader of the diary, we are just reading.  I hate books where I’m just a reader, I want to be in it, in the thick bush of it (literarily).

I’m frustrated by this.  I so badly wanted to be this woman, and I was excluded because of that darn second person.  I couldn’t be her because I wasn’t let in with enough details and metaphors.  It was almost too much thought, and too much in the specific mind of this woman that the surrounding details weren’t there.  I want to know what she smells like, what the bush smells like, what it tastes like when the pages of eucalyptus are burning.  I need these fine things in writing, and I need them in order to place myself there.  I need them to travel with the book and feel the Australian dead soil on my bare feet making them black and molten.  But, you’re not given that because all you get are thoughts and feelings which can almost never drive a narrative.

When you do get to the sexual exploration with Tol in the middle parts of the book, it does pick up.  We’re learning with the two of them about bodies and teenage excitement, and the tools of writing that Tol uses, like feathers, knap-sacks, tin cans filled with pencils.  However, because this is an older man “teaching” a younger woman how to be an instrument of pleasure, it rides a little on objectification.  I think the ending is needed just so women accept the advantages taken.  While “you” learns what her body can do, and learns how to control it, this man is also feeding her pleasure, making sure she is anchored to him.  It’s a bit unsettling when you really think about it.  Obviously, she finds herself by the end (can’t tell you how) and finds how much it helped her to be seventeen and spending her summer against a spring mattress on the floor.

All I can think about after finishing this book is the dust that settled into that house, coated dressers and collected on windowsills is the same dust that traveled with her always, connecting her to Tol and that summer.  And that’s a lovely sentiment.  How that one piece of place, a sense of it, dusts us and brings us back to those people.  For me, dirty dishes carry me to Australia.  Anytime I’m doing dishes, I’m thinking about the rain in Canberra and the e-mails warning us not to walk in tall grasses unless there’s a clear path.  It’s funny how these domestic things tie us to places.  Obviously what ties her to this place is her own sexual awakening in a house that is crumbling by death, and Australian dust.

I love finding out what brings people to memories.  And they’re always dainty things; sounds, smells, simple mannerisms.  Moth balls in the stairwell bring the linings of my father’s suit jackets that are huddled on hangers like birds on electric wires.  Honeysuckle means catching crayfish in the creek behind the playground.  If you take anything from this book, take the symbols of your memory.  Take the smell of your mom’s sugar icing and let yourself drift into her yellow kitchen, her ladybug curtains.

6 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , | posted in book reviews, books

May 29, 2012

Newsday Tuesday

By Cassie

Favorite Tweets:

Favorite Search Terms:

  • If I wanted the government in my womb: I’d suck down the whole thing, all three branches; judicial, executive, legislative. (See I listened in High School US History).
  • tracy k. smith poetry excerpts: Her Poem, “Interrogative“
  • yellow bedroom anis comforter: somehow this search term managed to confuse me into Anais Nin being connected to The Yellow Wallpaper.  It’s early, no coffee yet.
  • cat lady comic book: IS THIS TRUE!?
  • what do owls symbolize in hoot: horror. Just FYI, on my mom’s bucket list is, “see an owl in the wild.”  Exact quote, “I only ever see them in zoos.”  They’re also nocturnal so it’s going to be hard to get this one going.
  • raven bird in my basement: Go Poe on that Raven.

Book News:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  • This is white space.  Fill it in with ferns of wild imagination.

11 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in book reviews, books, poetry, Young Adult

May 28, 2012

Project 365 | Week 21

By Cassie

Sorry I’m a day late.  Vacation without wi-fi is a wonderful thing.

This is my week in instagram:

My Week in Instagram

There’s the squirrel-body pen holder to sign up for a concealed carry class.

The boats we took out by Shackleford Island.

My cat posing like a boy-toy on the bed.

Hatchback the Hermit Crab of the Cape (I think that could be a comic book title for the nerdy by the sea).

Pictures from Billy’s boat shop where he builds boats that look like whale skeletons, all ribs of wood.

Day 141 | A Monday

Someone had inspiration for the gym.

My inspiration is Beyonce dance music, but someone wanted to look like the Mad Hatter, or Hunter S. Thompson after they worked their glutes.

Day 142 | A Tuesday

Model Cat

You know how they say dogs eventually look like their owners and vice versa.  Well, it’s true about cats too.

Day 143 | A Wednesday

Where I always end up anytime I travel: A Bookstore

Why do I love bookstores so much? Clutter.

Found a bookstore without a gps (Toes on the windshield, prints in a row of five, and a flap of map folded open).

Bookstores by the Sound have boats, and canoes that float pages to you by the window.

Day 144 | A Thursday

Oh, Sylvia

“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.” — Sylvia Plath

Day 145 | A Friday

My First Book Mobile. Had to document.

“In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.” — Mark Twain

Don’t worry, I WILL be blogging about this later.

Day 146 | A Saturday

Cape Lookout

“Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.” — Anne Lamott

There’s so many metaphors for lighthouses.  They’re the flashlights to the world before we had an industrial revolution.  One thing about me, I’m deathly afraid of the dark.  My best friend once shut a pantry door on me and I immediately started crying.  Lighthouses are a light to the world when the moon is just a sliver of fingernail in the sky.

Day 147 | A Sunday

Grainy Sea

I’m not even sure who took this picture on my camera, but it’s gorgeous and faded.  Tropical Storm Beryl has grayed us.

7 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in book reviews, books, Photography, Project 365, Uncategorized

May 23, 2012

When Women Were Birds (A murder of crows)

By Cassie

Dear God,  if I never read this book, I would have been at a loss.

I am completely, utterly, every whimsical note of my body, indebted to Terry Tempest Williams for everything she put on that blank page  while she wrote, When Women Were Birds.  (In fact, I would love to see her out takes basket).  This book is the landscape of writing, the geography of being a woman – how your body is indebted to fields, and seeds, and words unspoken, left mingling with the soft air puffed just before you open your mouth.  I have never felt more myself, and more a woman than when reading this book.  I know, I know, I have this affinity for birds and I metaphorically and literally believe women were probably once birds, but that has nothing to do with the hope, and power of the words that are voiced in this book.

I can’t even begin to type this blog.  It took me twenty minutes to convince myself that I had to share this book regardless if I had the words, or not.  The whole point of this book is to remind us that we’re women, and we have it, we’re made of it, we are IT.  We are feathered, and skinned, and silent, and lionesses, and remarkable.  If ever I wanted to know the mural of my own body, what the roundness of moles meant, and the sow of freckles, it was during this book.  I mean you have to pinch yourself over and over while you read it.

Am I a woman, you say.  Am I everything.

When Women Were Birds is the story of the secret lives of women.  Tempest tells the historical crow etchings of women in China that could only be read by other women, her own life surrounded by wilderness, her mother, her husband and Mormon tradition.  She is at one point sliced above the eye by a falcon on a river trip and so her connection to birds is physical.  It begins with the Mormon tradition (of women) to write journals for themselves and their daughters.  On her death bed, Williams’ mother tells Williams to seek out her journals only after she has passed.  Williams finds the journals, all stacked in their leather glory, she opens every single one to the white field of blank page.

My Mother’s journals are paper cranes.

My Mother’s journals are “just after.”

My Mother’s journals are a “harmony of silence.”

A few weeks ago, a dear blogger told me that although she was gifted with her mother’s journals when she passed away, she never read them.  I am the kind of daughter, and woman, that would scavenge the pages for the imperfections in my mom’s cursive.  I would learn how to read shorthand so I didn’t make mistakes with the swift movements in her margin notes.  I’d play a guessing game with food stains.  Where was she.  What was she doing while she wrote this. I would decipher her language, and like a sponge store as much of my mother’s internal life as I could.

Sometimes, when we write journals we imagine our daughter’s reading them and then the whole concept of journaling goes out the window.  A journal, is a moment within yourself.  A way to remember something twice, the way it was when you were there and the way it is on the page.  When you journal, or you write, you get to live every aspect of your life twice, whether you’re living it in reality, or in the lie that you’ve created it to be.  Writers have that odd ability to not actually live in the moment, but just secretly record everything that’s going on.  I used to go to parties in college and constantly say to myself remember this moment, remember the way that boy spilled beer on the table, remember the way “musty” smells, remember the way boys bicker with each other which isn’t anything like the way females bicker.  Writer’s don’t live, they soak, and prod.  They create something magic between the pen and hand.

Here, I am blogging my guts, and yet, I’m not writing what I would say about my family in a journal, what my dad sounds like when he sleeps, or my mom smells like after a day at the bakery.  Those are my private secrets, the ones I leave blank for you, but I fill to the brim in my stitched journal that goes everywhere with me.

My journal (Quotes from When Women Were Birds)

Throughout this book, I was weeding quotes of Williams and salting my page with them.  My journal is now covered in quotes that split the world open.  Quotes like:

“My mother’s voice is a lullaby in my cells.  When I am still, my body feels her breathing” (19).

“I have talked to myself for years in the privacy of my journals.  The only thing I’ve done religiously are keep a journal and use birth control” (43).

“It is winter.  Ravens are standing on a pile of bones – black typeface on white paper picking an idea clean.  It’s what I do each time I sit down to write.  What else are we to do with our obsessions?  Do they feed us?  Or are we simply scavenging our memories for one gleaming image to tell the truth of what is hunting us” (56).

“I want to speak and comprehend words of wounding without having these words become the landscape where I dwell” (204).

These quotes speak only a dribble of the weeping that this book holds.  It makes me fascinated by my mother, by my need for words and the lines of a page to smear into my own harbored print.  But mostly, it made me proud to be a woman, whether I keep silent (which is rare), or I test the waters. I yell, I screech sometimes to get a point across, but never does a screech work.  I should learn to be silent sometimes, or just quiet.  I should learn to listen to the birds harmonize and the orchastra of mumbles, and throat tickles.  Listen to the way my father coo’s when he naps, breathing out bays of air. I shared this even though I know you are reading, even though this is my public journal, and my mother will smell like knead and yeast when she takes off her apron and throws it onto the washer machine this evening.  She will have white icing stains on her pockets that look like finger-paint and the spiral print of her thumb.

—–

I hate it when I want to talk about a book and I don’t have the words.   I just watch the white space pile up like ocean froth.  It’s drowning.  The white expanse that I’m supposed to fill up with words that make you want to get in the car, even though it’s been a long day, and it’s bath night, and their are suds opening from the plastic bottle.

You need this book because it breathes exactly what you are.  I dropped chocolate granola bar in the binding and almost called-out because I wanted the library-goer who got this book after me to find it pristine for the picking.  To find their way through the book without a compass, the way all good books find you lost in the wild.  I want a reader to go in wild, go into the margins, go into the cracks, and the o’s, and the words, and the steam that comes off the pages of a book that takes you across valleys within yourself.

How do you tell someone how you are changed by a book.

Do you write a blog explaining that you can’t tell them because here, it’s too personal, and here the choreography of your body has taken over.  You are all feel, no reason.  You are exactly what we are meant to be, human substance: cells, atoms, water, free.

I am a bird on a wire.  I am wondering why the electricity is not surging.  Why is it that birds can sit on the cords and not be shocked.  How can they sit so still when they have wings.  And how do women (or people) conquer white pages, conquer their expected roles, climb through the square face of fence binding them, conquer centuries of silence, the smell of palm when a hand covers their mouths.

40 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in book reviews, books

May 22, 2012

Newsday Tuesday

By Cassie

Favorite Tweets:

My nephew’s name is Jackson Wolf A.

Favorite Search Terms

  • empty schoolyard: flat basketballs, dust bunnies, tennis shoes hanging from electric wires by their perfectly bowed laces.
  • yodas house: Holy Noodles, my imagination just blew up nuclear style.
  • then sail, my fine lady, on the billowing wave from the penelopiad: I just love when people google things like that.  I mean, who googles this?  It’s like a Greek Goddess got a google machine in her tower.
  • bagels and bowel movements: what a great foodie blog title.  You should go with this.  Spread the cream cheese love.
  • my windows aren’t dirty thats my cats nose art: I just needed to share this one.
  • best holiday in my mind description text use expressions lying, nosing around, potter around and must-dos: I hope you mean HARRY potter around.
  • dresses for my friend caroline who is having a party on a ship but not a tight dress cause that’s bad: I feel like I’m fourteen and own a yacht when I read this.  Or maybe P.Diddy’s other 9 children are finally having their sweet sixteens.

Book News

2 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in book reviews, books, Photography, poetry, Young Adult

May 20, 2012

Project 365 | Week 20

By Cassie

Day 134: A Monday

Day 134 | My Sweet Linus.

Jack the Wolf can be really cute.  Other times he tells my mother her dingle can’t move like his.  In these moments, he pees onto the toilet seat and lets the yellow dribble into the bowl.

Day 135: A Tuesday

Day 135 | Water Color Curls

Sometimes I create works of genius in teen art.  Sometimes I draw fairies with curly hairs.

Day 135 | Scabby Daddy

My dad face planted in the driveway.  His post-plant quote, “I laid there for four minutes thinking someone might come by, or that I was dead, but eventually I got up.”  This was the worst of the face, knee, elbow and hand scabs.

Day 136: A Wednesday

Day 136 | Spider Cat

Apparently, I have a comic book cat.  He thinks he’s some sort of mighty haired villain.  This is him getting ready to scale doorways.  Can you tell he’s made of crazy?

Day 137: A Thursday

Day 137 | Putty Face

My coworker has a broken finger and this is what therapy gave him for the week.  When therapy gives you putty, make mustaches, unibrows, and smiles.

Day 138: A Friday

Day 138 | Just Another Sunset

Everyone loves a good sunset picture.  My ice-cream-partner-in-crime turned the car around to park towards the sunset so we could watch it flush away and I could put my toes against the pink and leave prints on the glass.

Day 139: A Saturday

Day 139 | Little Bird

I found my cat wagging and yipping over this small bird.  I want to hold it in my palms like river water.  Plus, look at that cool-kid mohawk.  He must have gone to the hair stylist.

Day 139 | HOLY SLUG

My parent’s grow the most ridiculous specimen in their yard.  I would salt the slugs, but who would want to diminish such an odd creation.  Let it ooze, buddy.  I have to remind myself of that thought when I step on them skipping to the door at night like Juliet after star gazing with Romeo.

Day 140: A Sunday (A Montage)

Day 140 | Guilty Face

Step 1: Look at mom guiltily.

Day 140 | Box Face

Step 2: Look adorable

Day 140 | Eat Bag Straps

Step 3: Be a kitten again.  Lick plastic bags.

8 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Photography, Project 365, Uncategorized

May 16, 2012

Let’s CHAP [stick][s][eau][erone][el] BOOK

By Cassie

I’m not even sure I like this blog.  Read at your own risk:

I love poetry chapbooks because they fit into the back pocket of my jeans even with the stretch denim. (All ladies know how hard it is to even carry a pencil in those darn stretch blues).

Chapbooks are the ones you cradle in independent bookstores.  Their cover images just speak to you and inside the pages, there’s that quote about your soul, and how you keep it stored only in a cold climate.  (Okay, I made all of that up, but chapbooks are  usually breath-taking and more importantly, just enough).

In a world where things are literally flying at your head from the interwebs as if your Alice falling down the rabbit hole’s shoot of rocking chairs, glass bottles, status updates, and mindless gossip, chapbooks are the pockets where you can breathe.  They’re like small nooks of poetry.  Even if you aren’t alone, socked-up to your shins in bed, you feel that way reading chapbooks.

Lately, books are filled to the brim with poems that were used as fillers.  Chapbooks hold the best poems – the poems worth that delicate whisper you use because you’re reading poetry, alone, in your bedroom and it’s too personal to let your family members, or even your cat hear.  When I say just enough, I mean that all the lines, all the verses, all the rhythms, are doing the same amount of work, all the poems carry that push.  I’m not saying they hold the same emotional packaging though.

Poets today who have made a name for themselves ride their name into pastoral poems about daybreak.  I’m not against those poems, but are they really pushing the boundaries of contemporary poetry and making us look at ourselves differently, or more fully.

The four recent chapbooks that I’ve read are The Sad Epistles by Emma Bolden, The Book of Women by Dorianne Laux, Invisible Girls by Erika Lutzner who runs New Poets for Peace, and everything by Noah Falck.

Emma Bolden’s poems in The Sad Epistles were published by Dancing Girl Press & Studios which publishes contemporary women’s poetry.  They publish about 10-12 women poets per year and always produce stunning little packets of words.  It’s like the bubble gum of poetry.   You can purchase The Sad Epistles from their website for just $7.  Believe me, you’ll want to make that purchase because I said so, and because Miss Bolden has a beautiful blog where she makes hilarious commentary on her life, and words.

Bolden uses stunning language that must be felt in the mouth.  You must eat poetry, it is ingested no other way.  You must read it aloud, use pauses to take breaths during the immediate grief you feel for your own romantic relationship gone sour like Bolden’s.

What more can you say about love than, “An old woman’s garden, peaches lost in their rot”  (Bolden). The Sad Epistles is metaphorically driven and takes us through a strict series of sadness with titles like, “Attempting to Determine the Affect of Absence by Number,” and “An Answer to the Question Why are You Shaking.”  Yes, when you end something, you quake and shake, you let your eye liner puddle black as wet soil and drain onto your cheeks.  It’s more than that with Miss Bolden, but you’ll have to see.  She’s much more capable with words than I am, using them like a personal jungle gym in outer space.  I’ve never seen that many metaphors, or that many stark raving images (naked, running laps around your parents’ house on a dare) come together and unfold so slowly, and painfully.

Laux’s Book of Women is the automatic response to her current poetry hardcover from Norton, Book of Men.  Her explanation for the book is “how can you have a book of men without having a book of women?”  The poems in the book are eternal Laux.  Dolly Parton’s breasts make an appearance, a she-snake and the death bed of a wife.  Her poetry is always, and will always be beautiful, sensual, something to rub against your skin.  I really don’t have to expand, other than sharing a few poems from the collection.

Here is a link to Waitress in Blip Magazine.

Here is a link to Secondhand Coat in Blip Magazine, also.

Invisible Girls is terrifying.  It ignites everything I fear for the world in one poetry collection.  It’s about girls given as sex slaves in brothels.  It burns, still.  One of my favorite lines from the collection is, “he held her down like she/was made of gossamer/yet, she felt like her body/was full of tar” (Lutzner).  I love it not because of its form but because it places what’s happening to these small girls in our backyard.  How many years ago was it that we tarred and feathered our own?  The historical connotation of this one line is amazing.  It’s easy to chalk things up to “oh, that’s happening in third world countries,” but we need to remember that it’s happening to human kind.  The word No is two letters, but demands the same respect whether spoken softly or raging.

Noah Falck wrote one of my all-time favorite poems ever.  I’m sure I’ve talked about him before on this blog.  He is a fourth grade teacher as well as poet, and more importantly a bomb-ass prose poet.  Yep, bomb-ass, perfect description, blow your butt up.  I’ve never been to the Midwest, but I want to because of this poem.

THE MEASURING TAPE FOR THE MIDWEST

extends beyond the five flavors of boredom and further than the dimple-smeared children circling the food court could ever imagine. It cuts through the town where the pop-top was invented, the town of the backpack vacuum cleaner, the first electric street light and along the traffic island where the three-legged stray dog everyone feeds but refuses to pet shivers before stumbling somewhere out in the distance where several new roads emerge beneath a caution light blinking above teenagers who suck face and viciously trade bubblegum and mononucleosis as shadows of fertilized cornhusk sway like children on roller skates.  It stretches into those remote zip codes you’ve always wondered about, where your dreams take place, where a single tree silhouetting the horizon is not quite ready for rain, where every August there is a sunset that bleeds into September. It bumps down dirt roads and amplifies the people from one light towns and people hugging in small groups, their colorful fannypacks overlapping in smoke groomed bowling alleys where everything swallows like cigarette ash and sunburn appears unexpectedly like a sixth child and unfolds near funny red-lipped people drinking to get drunk because not everything needs an answer because breathing only stops after another double-bacon cheeseburger and continues down alleyways and crosswalks through tollbooths and potholes near chain-link fenced-in yards which hold children and plastic and innocence with storms on the horizon and horizons on the storm, the sounds like unhung paintings left in the closet, like snow filled landscapes and whispers in far out lawns where people are being born and people are dying, and people are laughing out loud and scaring hiccups out of their bodies beneath sudden gushes of acid rain.”

(This poem was first published in The Equalizer, 2010 and I’m going to pray fervently that no one gets mad at me for posting it).

I like Noah Falck because he uses the middle school kissing disease “mono” in a poem.  We all said we got it through a straw in a soft drink, but really, that was you in the stairwell wasn’t it?

I like Falck because in my mind….(probably not in his) he doesn’t care about being published in major markets that have been around 85+, but are publishing crap contemporary poetry (I’m looking at you ____ ).   He has been published by one of THE BEST contemporary journals in America right now, NYQ.  Falck is also published in contemporary markets regardless of online, or in print, and regardless if the markets are in the “old-boys” poetry club.

You would think poetry would be the one outlet where everyone is equal, and everyone can publish whether their name is Collins, Merwin or Joe Schmo but no, poetry is fervent in the classics club.  You didn’t publish Red Wheelbarrow, you’re not invited to our foundation gala.  I know all art comes with a name attached and the biggest names sell the biggest pieces, but what’s to say someone wasn’t born recently who is going to be the next Anne Sexton, ear nudged to a phone, curling the cord around her manicure and dreaming of red. (End Rant). You can visit Falck’s website here, and buy his newest book there as well.

Thank God for Poetry Professors with Facebook. My broadside from 2010 Advanced Poetry with D.Laux. It’s Margaret Atwood. Yes, Marg Wood writes poems.  I’m an awkward goose.

Here’s a short history of the chapbook: The word chapbook came from bibliophiles, and peddlers.  If someone was particularly outraged by a new law, or the ladies gossip circle, they were able to print up little pamphlets to argue their side.  They’re almost always less than forty pages (usually poetry) and can be made at a low cost with paper and staples, or as a fine piece of poetic art carved from gold (although that would be quite heavy, so maybe their just gold leaf).  My favorite historical remnant of the chapbook is that they started with broadsides which were popular songs sold for half a penny.  Yes, that means you need to carry your kitchen sheers in your pocket to cut your pennies for words.

Don’t be put off by their tiny size, embrace the thin bind, imagine all the trees they saved.

18 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in book reviews, books, poetry

May 15, 2012

Newsday Tuesday

By Cassie

Favorite Tweets:

Favorite Search Terms:

  • attractiveness for a book: I’m looking for a perfectly bound man with a leather spine.  If you have gold paned edges and words that are in perfect Georgia font, I’d like to take you to dinner in my purse to mingle with my tissues, receipts and empty lipstick containers.  That Southern accented font gets me every time.  If your blurb reads “couldn’t put me down,” call me – 1800bokdate.
  • poems for funny stories in relation to blood borne pathogens: The best thing I could find on google for this was a “Bloodborne Pathogens Rap,” here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hti4LBGaBXQ (Someone’s science teacher is awesome).
  • books on hovercrafts: With those eyes, aliens probably need large print.
  • short stories about glaciers: I’m not sure about short stories, but check out Glaciers by Alexis Smith, and Shiver by Nikki Gemmell.

Book News:

17 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in book reviews, books, Photography, poetry

May 13, 2012

Project 365 | Week 19

By Cassie

Another week, another wash load of photos:

Day 126: A Sunday

Day 126 | I’m becoming my Mother

I found this magnet, and I quite enjoyed it, and then I decided I could make it myself, and I haven’t.  (Series-of-unfortunate-commas, oh man).  I totally regret not buying it on the spot for my new fridge.  (I got a big girl job).  I keep telling my friends not to be jealous of my big girl job because my mom keeps shouting, “Put on your big girl panties” throughout our house.    Plus, she has more fridge magnets than the big fridge in the sky.  I’m becoming my mother.

Day 127:  A Monday

Day 127 | Out of the Club Stripping.

I decided it would be really cool if I stripped my bed, not for washing, but for staining.  When I was a junior in college I  painted a giant white tree on the head board.  I was (am) really into nature and all that, being barefoot – you know.  I didn’t realize stripping your bed is a whole ordeal.  However, I did discover that at the bare wood, someone painted a lovely little bouquet.  I think my mom haggled our neighbors down to $15 on this vintage find when we got it.

Day 128: A Tuesday

Day 128 | I’m in the 39%

Like President Obama, I’m for marriage equality.  A lot of people think that this Amendment 1 was to ban the unions between LGBTQ community members, but all it did was prolong the inevitable.  Like Obama has said in the past, we are a nation that is evolving.  Here’s how I look at it: you don’t have to vote for Gay Marriage, you have to vote for equality.   This Amendment wasn’t asking for the holy rollers to let the LGBTQ community get married in the sanctity of their church, but under the government.  This is why we have separation of church and state, people.

Here’s a story:

Yesterday, I stopped at Food Lion on my way home to get Broccoli.  One of my teens who I hadn’t seen in a while was the cashier in my line.  Of course, I asked him where he’d been.

He said, “I have no reason to come up there anymore.”

“Why?”

“We got a computer at home and everything.”

Now, I’ve had a computer my entire life.  I never wanted for technology, or anything really, in my household.  I always had easy access to Microsoft Word to type my papers, and google search was available for all the examples I used in those papers.  However, to my teen at Food Lion having a computer at home was a remarkable thing.   Think about this story next time you imagine everyone as equal.  Ask yourself then how you can make this life more equal, more free for others.

Day 129: A Wednesday

Day 129 | “Tonight we Dine in Hell”

This is Jasper on the kitchen island.  THIS is Jasper the dictator.

Day 130: A Thursday

Day 130 | Spring, darling

“With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?” — Oscar Wilde

Day 131: A Friday

Day 131 | WantonCreation makes me wonder if bowling shoes are the same in every country.

I want to know where you can buy bowling shoes.  They looked cute with my summer dress.

Day 131 | Winning

I know that score says I’m not winning, but I just got a strike! (Strikes! are in need of exclamation points).

Day 132 : A Saturday

Day 132 | Daily Toes Cleaning

Sometimes, he’s cute, only sometimes though.  This blog is a Holy Comma Disaster.

Day 133: A Sunday

Day 133 | Happy Mother’s Day

On the side of the road a little goose family was munching on the propellers of dandelions.  Weird thing is, my mother loves Geese.  She giggles over gaggles (had to get it in there).  In honor of my mother, and all wonderful mothers like her, Happy Mother’s Day.

16 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Photography, Project 365, Uncategorized

May 10, 2012

The Air We Breathe

By Cassie

Tea Art | Ginger Pear

I don’t know how I muscled through this, how my eyes in the dark continuously focused on these words that weren’t beautiful, or even at all interesting.  I managed to amuse myself with a series called “tea art.”  See my newest feature, “Ginger Pear” to your left.

This is the second book of boring that I’ve read by Andrea Barrett.  Her stories in Ship Fever (which contained the Mendel Pea Story which I was so fond of) won the National Book Award and prompted me to give her a second chance at wowing me with The Air We Breathe.  (Yes, I expect to be wowed, I’m a book snob).  I was especially interested on how she narrates with the group (first-person plural) “we.”  While I think this is an imaginative concept and really outlines the group thought that goes on and becomes extremely important by the end of the book, it didn’t make the read worth it.

This is my frustrated face.

I think where my problems lie with Barrett are in pacing, and detail.  Her pacing is unbelievable slow.  It took me a wild 5 days to get through this book.  I wasn’t inspired to continue picking it up and not interested in the main characters enough to keep striving.  I should have just flipped to the family history at the end of the book to discover that Leo and Eudora (fabulous name) do in fact marry and live endlessly in love and without tuberculosis for the rest of their days.  Instead, I read on like a girl floating on a chunk of wooden barge during calm sea times.

The book is set in 1916 at a Tuberculosis Sanatorium.  The threat of war is imminent and by the end is upon everyone in the town.  I think this is part of the problem why the collective “we” didn’t work.  I hardly got to know the voice of any characters even though a main part of the plot are these Wednesday meetings when someone from the local sick speaks about themselves and anything they’d like to educate others on.  I thought this was such an interesting way to get people connecting in a story, set them in a meeting.  It’s like going to an AA meeting – of course you’re going to find characters, or a Bible Study meeting.  You can’t tell me their aren’t bonneted Baptist women with gray comb overs that are shouting to you from the page.  Just imagine their red face upon the latest town marriage, or the shrill of their voices as they gossip.

A meeting is such a great setting for a fictional environment and yet the meetings were inherently boring.  One of the things Barrett has been praised for is her use of science and technology in fiction.  However, in these parts where I should be dying to understand fossils, or really feeling the radiation of x-rays before they were perfected, I was left dulled and sighing.  The only time the x-rays really made my heart twinge was when Eudora x-rayed Leo and through this the reader was able to see just how biological love can be, just how scientific.  Doesn’t the wife of a husband who’s had a heart attack think about that heart afterwards, think about the vessels and how that thick red mud is sloshing through them, where the nutrients are, what he should eat?  Love, as inherently biological is another great concept.

Unfortunately, this may be a case of a lack in beautiful writing.  Not once in 297 pages did I feel the need to scribble down a beautiful phrase.  In a story of love, sickness and war, there should be beauty.  There should be beauty and not boredom in that loneliness, and that excitement.  Instead, I was neither taken with the word choice (the details) or angry with them.  I felt that this was just a story told straight, nothing fancy.  And where’s the fun in that?  Did Barrett rely solely on the “we” to make this a book of genius?

The Air We Breathe | Andrea Barrett

There were moments in Ship Fever where I wanted to eat the page; rip-it-broken down the binding, crumple it into my fist and shove it into my soaked mouth.  I didn’t, of course because I’m not a Destructor, but those moments are important in any book. All books should be held to beauty.  I know that everyone’s idea of beauty is different, but books should move people.  Books should make you stay up past lights out, and hold a flashlight past when your arm is tired and those sleep pins are pricking because your blood has stopped flowing.  They should make you want to EAT PAPER, eat words, eat.  Then on the other hand they should starve you, they should make you bleed to find out what the character will do next, what way the writer will describe a wooden fence in the country.

I’m not saying don’t read Barrett, or don’t read The Air We Breathe, just be forewarned that it isn’t something you’ll hold in your hands like gold.  Hey, maybe it would make a great movie. This book will move you to create art out of a draining tea bag, let the tainted water puddle over the scrap paper.

34 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in book reviews, books, Photography, Travel

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