NaPoWriMo Day 4

Don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to keep this up, especially as I’ll be away from home tomorrow, but…

She Should Have Been in Politics

Poof!

Mini-review of the day: Dog Girl, by Heidi Lynn Staples from Ahsahta Press

Ahsahta’s books are always beautiful objects…I haven’t, in the past, I admit, been a big fan of Heidi Lynn Staples work – I saw it as being poetry so insistent on “interrogating the language” that it was on the edge of not giving anything to the reader, resolutely nonsensical and overly in love with its own puns. So, I was pleasantly surprised by this collection – perhaps I like wordplay more than I used to, perhaps the poems about marriage tempted me, the interest she has in Japanese forms that I share, that epigraph from Grimm’s obscure (but loved by me) fairy tale, Jorinde and Joringel – but something drew me in. Here are some playful and passionate lines from one of a series called “Prosaic:” “His hands touched me with a whole science…His eyes shined with hackers. I opened my codes.” There are some surprisingly touching poems here about the loss of a baby (“Not, You No” and “Arson” among them) that transcend wordplay and ring with emotional impact.