Sorry to bug you with a
letter, but I couldn’t find a suggestion box at your original 32nd Ave location, and I didn’t
want to trouble your devoted employees, who were busy offering samples, filling
waffle cones, and making change. Not that you need any help from us peons: you’re
the Emperor of Ice Cream!
And I’m your No. 1 Fan.
Seriously. I was there at Ground Zero during the soft opening, followed by the
grand opening, then two or three times a week, more often six or seven, for the
past however many glorious years. My doctor has some concerns about my diet
owing to my weight and cholesterol levels, but only because he’s a worrywart
who’s never tasted two scoops of your Almond Brittle with Salted Ganache in a
sugar cone.…
Why do I cry? I saw a jewel. No heart, no bones and nerveless in the pink postcoital light—
I am nowhere near done, so you say imagine an animal— and I am taken to the white core of the Cambrian explosion, bend in the heat and emerge with an apple—
and we have bobbed in the tropics, bobbed in the icy polar seas and mindlessly scoured the floor—
stingers drawn head and tail aglow with Jamaica Farewell, you catch a swell.
For
me, non-fiction has to meet a lot of requirements in order to be classified as
a good read. I’m a curious person. Even a nosy one. I want to eavesdrop on the
writer’s experiences and secret thoughts. I want to know what happened to them.
I want to understand how they felt. And, most of all, I hope to discover
profundity, some kind of wisdom about what it means to be alive. It’s a tall
order, but I’ve found a book that fills it.
Relief
by Execution: A Visit to Maunthausen by Gint Aras (Finding the Moon in Sugar,
The Fugue) is one of the best
non-fiction books I’ve read in a long time. Lyrical and gripping while sparkling with wisdom, Aras leads his reader
through darkness and despair to epiphany as he ruminates on his experiences of
abuse, racism, ethnic identity, and the long-term effects of generational
trauma.…
There’s
a scene in Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted: A
Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia where she describes reading philosophy in
all-night cafes, drinking black coffee after black coffee, while debating the materialist
ontology.
This,
I remembered thinking the moment I read the scene. This is what it is like to have anorexia. Forget the magazine
obsessive, model-thin striving stereotype that I had seen again and again and
again. This was the ‘real’ anorexic–not a hunger for beauty or thinness, but a
hunger for knowledge and nothing but. As Hornbacher states in several places in
the memoir, being bulimic was something bodily, corporeal–while anorexia was
ethereal, saint-like. To be an anorectic was to be knowledge incarnate.
The
first time I read Marya Hornbacher’s memoir, I was twenty.…
The white ceiling above my bed is swirling Into flowers and faces. I should probably look away But looking away means acknowledging the swelling Of my abdomen and that means acknowledging The advice I’ve ignored—to go for brisk walks To eat a tablespoon of hot sauce To pray for the faith to be restored, As if I haven’t already prayed till I cried as if That isn’t why I’m too drained to do much else To roll over, to press my feet into the stirrups, To push. Who am I if not pregnant With stagnancy and rot? Is there anything else? This burning like nausea, this deep squeezing Instinct to escape flooding my dirty sheets— God it’s stuck Like a seed in my teeth An eyelash in my eye A tumor on my abdominal wall, God Cut me open.…
Daniel Cowper’s debut poetry collection, Grotesque Tenderness, was recently published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. The book is divided into five parts, three of which are discrete poem sequences and two of which are collections of poems on regret and relationships. Beyond that, he’s the Poetry Editor of PULP Literature and he’s married to poet Emily Osborne.
In this episode of Cover to Cover with . . ., Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum speaks with Cowper about Grotesque Tenderness, the pros and cons of workshopping creative writing, combining personal, historical, geographical, and mythical inspirations, and more!
