Category: Book Talk
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let it be extravagant
Great Expectations reads like a memoir; it has the memoirist’s capricious elisions and divulgences; because it is written from a distance, elements that might, in a novel, serve as key plot points (eg: becoming a father at nineteen) are bulleted; we get a different coming of age: the dawn of a critic, ambivalently participating in…
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The Fourth Mom
The sky and sea were the same color, lapis shot through with malamute steel, an open mouth with a hangnail moon under which I mostly drifted, though occasionally I stood to get the full, battering force of the incoming tide. Yards away, my friend was chanting up at the sky, “flourish,”relish,” some pleasant, sybillant incantation…
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The first principle of place
“Did any of you happen to see –” desperately, he wracked his brain for an op-ed or headline relevant to order forms. “To see–” he repeated. Wing it. “What happened to the bond market this morning?” The maybe engineer’s eyes were trained on Jamie’s, and he smiled at her. “Something very unusual occurred,” he said.…
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The Guest, and other ghost stories
The summer of 2008, on the east end of Long Island – it was the disintegration of a dream, those mad, tilting moments between dream and fantasy and fever dream and nightmare. It was the summer of the Montauk Monster and the first season of the Real Housewives of New York and flip video cameras.…
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Stain of sun, dust of yellow buttercups
In early spring, I take a pitchfork to the long-buried borders, unpeeling packet after packet of dead maple leaves. The snowdrops underneath are a startled, resentful chartreuse. I scrub moss off the barn doors with dish soap and hearty amounts of borax and wage sisyphean battles on the den carpet’s behalf against the profligate mud…
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some poetic shock of intensity
Mid-September, my husband falls from the lowest branch of the hemlock tree beside the kitchen – twenty feet! – and breaks his leg. Beastly tree! Beastly ladder. The latter splayed where it has fallen, the unnatural diagonal, the beastly orange of it all – until my brother in law disposes of it. The ladder is…
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Goodness, Deconcentration, and the Great Concavity
Easter, 2014. I put on a chartreuse dress and lilac suede sandals and Brady and I go uptown to my great aunt’s where we eat mille feuille from Lady M and drink probably too much white wine out of small, weighty hock glasses. On the way home I get off the subway two stops early…
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Just a chapter and not the story itself
A second birthday, a third maternity leave. A second August and most of September in our new old house. Great rains sometimes fall / evening cicadas sing /dew glistens white on grass / swallows leave. This is the week that thunder ceases (more is expected this weekend). Like that, the baby is two months old. Like…
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Inaudible as dreams, or: thoughts on discursion and A Life’s Work
The first thing that occurred to me, as I watched the woman strike the child, was that surely I was not the only witness. A limpid, early summer evening, on a cul-de-sac of tightly spaced houses — surely other families were watching, from their back patios, their screened porches, their postage stamp front yards. At…
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codes so subtle that they change their whole meaning in half a line
A year and a day ago we packed up our car and drove to Vermont. For a day it was spring and then for a long while it was winter. That period feels like the airclay I got my son: you can mound it up or flatten it out or stretch it loooong. A year…
éclaircissements 