Evans, whose object would have been
to draw the biographer’s attention away
from the business of being photographed,
might have asked Edel to interpret
Eliot’s encomium on James:
that he had “a mind so fine
no idea could penetrate it.”
Edel, distinctly self-conscious,
might have laughed this off
as modernist hagiography,
allowed as how James
had plenty of big ideas:
Innocence, Europe, Art.… ...continue reading
She finished her spiced-rum gimlet,
placed her toenail clippings
in the glass with the ice cubes
dissolving.
Such was her resolve
to drink no more
that night,
and the hi-fi played
calypso,
island songs so old
that the brown girls
locked inside them
were skulls and misplaced photographs.
She dreaded going to bed,
yet she dreaded standing there
alone,
near the open window
where the entire physical world
might disappear
in a bullfrog’s throat
or worse,
might not.
– Glen Armstrong… ...continue reading
There’s a scene in Angelica Baker’s debut novel, Our Little Racket, where the underaged daughter of a fallen financial tycoon escapes her Greenwich, Connecticut community and runs off to New York City. She’s looking for a reprieve from the suffocating attention her family is under and winds up at a noisy bar. It has an underlying din dominated by male voices and interspersed with female shrieks in reaction to them. The moment is an apt metaphor for this book and its rumination on the ways in which women can become the collateral damage of scandal. In this novel, the men at the root of the story create chaos and then proceed to exist in shadows, while the women are positioned to be reactive, left to process the situation they’ve inherited and face societal scrutiny head-on.… ...continue reading
“My biggest fear…” I could tell him my biggest fear, but he wouldn’t understand it. Only two people in my life have understood it and one of them would never admit to understanding it. We are the 1%. The cosmic joke. The empty. The unexplainable.
We are living contradictions because we are not one person. No, we don’t have split personalities. We are always us. Always complicated, and always multiple things, never just one thing.
We want so badly to be a part of all this, but we will never be a part of this because we cannot commit to being one person. We will not take one path because we do not see the point in walking when the destination is not our decision. The destination is the same no matter the path.… ...continue reading
Because I’ve felt up the smooth spine of books
with the caress of my finger, and I’ve passed time
under the hold of a good book, I know my mother.
When I was seven, I learned about stone soup
from hungry soldiers in an audiobook, and you
wouldn’t believe how the stomach thinks in hunger.
My mother grew up and lived against a menu of hunger
and her Bible was the mountain peak to a pile of books.
She’s stopped going to church, but she’s said to me, you
have to believe. I was fifteen the first time
a pastor’s preaching made my tears collect like soup
in a falling bowl. I have seen my mother… ...continue reading
A multi-Pushcart nominee in RHINO and Drunken Boat, Carol Smallwood’s founded and supported humane societies. Her 2017 books include: In Hubble’s Shadow (Shanti Arts); Prisms, Particles, and Refractions (Finishing Line Press); Interweavings: Creative Nonfiction (Shanti Arts); Library Outreach to Writers and Poets: Interviews and Case Studies of Cooperation; and Gender Issues and the Library: Case Studies of Innovative Programs and Resources (McFarland). Here, she is interviewed by author Aline Soules.
Your books cover a wide range of topics and genres—poetry, creative nonfiction, and non-fiction mainly aimed at the library world. How did you end up writing such a broad array of work? How do you balance these various projects?
I started when teachers asked me for classroom materials as a librarian. Then, seeing my first book spurred me to do another, and then another.… ...continue reading
Naomi was holed up with Scooter and his beautiful baggie of Oxy in The Cutler Corner Motel—Room 13—when the tornado touched down and set the whole place to shaking. She had barely partaken of the powder when the walls of the motel room began to rumble like a train was passing just outside the window. Naomi gripped the threadbare comforter, wondering if a mine had collapsed or the world was ending.
“Oh shit! Oh shit!” yelled Scooter, trying to pull his jeans up over his greying underwear but kept getting tangled up until he tipped into the veneer dresser, knocking his stash onto the red shag carpeting.… ...continue reading