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This is not a writer who takes the easy way out. As she learns to mother her son, she leaves delectable signposts for the reader, as the page turns from journalism to inventive forms of speculative and factual nonfiction. Not only is this her story, but it is also the story of what this all means to the writer—and ultimately the reader— who is offered the gift of witnessing how Banham’s approach to mothering and its history in her family unfolds.
Metaphor, irony, and paradox abide in all five sections of this book. The ball in the opening poem of the first section, “And just like that,” becomes more than a ball “red hot as it flew overhead, each time / gathering speed covered / a greater distance,” literally in the park, figurative in the poet’s emotional landscape.
Although we see the inner journey of Artie and a couple of his closest friends, the story steps out of introspection enough to show us a good view of the 1980s-era occupied nation. Train stations, nightclubs, folk music, hotels and tourist sites, and the countryside and ordinary people’s homes paint a portrait of a nation with a vibrant culture, even under occupation.
The book is very much centred on water: its criticality to human and other forms of life, and the ways in which we are intimately connected by water to all living things. Though The Green Room is relatively short it covers a lot of ground, with thirty short poems that are powerfully condensed. Keneally utilises the gaps or silences between words and stanzas, often separating lines with double, triple or quadruple spaces. The poems flow like water, leaving plenty of room to pause and reflect between words.
Every committed reader eventually faces the same question at the airport gate.
Do you carry the 600-page hardcover you’re halfway through, or the slim e-reader that holds it and four hundred other titles? For years the debate was framed as a loyalty test, paper purists on one side and early adopters on the other.
Plenty of readers have quietly settled it. They read both, and they’ve developed surprisingly consistent rules about which book goes where.
The plots of these three stories unfold slowly. All three have many characters, and each character is necessary, each plays a part in moving their story to its conclusion. In the first two stories the main characters are well intentioned but become victims of their own righteousness. Ironically the protagonist of “A Fully Clothed Breakfast” wins the war, not on the battlefield but within himself.
With a one-word title, a poem becomes a political statement, a thermometer of the zeitgeist. But Horvath refuses to settle down. Her North Star drives a quest for understanding. She is wondering about meaning and purpose, particularly when answers aren’t obvious. How do we know when it’s good? How do we know it’s enough? Where does the poem end?
Reading Kurt Olsson’s The Unnumbered Anniversaries is like believing that you’re walking a route you’ve taken since childhood, then waking up, that same landscape outside the bedroom window. It’s hard to separate the dream from the real. And it becomes true that the dream and the real are inseparable, maybe the same.
The story is so easy to read and humorous, that it’s easy to miss how much ground Browne covers. Gone Guru manages to balance post-modernist reflexiveness with a fast-paced mystery. This is very much a book about the process of its own construction
In this extremely far-ranging interview of the long-form variety, the author of Women In Marigold talks about her practice, many of the poems in the collection, themes, her novels, fiction vs poetry, pressures and representation, Nepal, poetics, history, geneology, spirituality and faith, poetic mentorship, and so much more!