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moonpix's reviews
336 reviews
The Lotus Flowers by Ellen Bryant Voigt
4.0
Lovely, accessable poetry. I thought The Cusp was espcially moving as a dialogue with part 2 of October by Louise Glück, whom this collection is dedicated to. My other favorites were A Song, The Waterfall, and Dancing with Poets.
"If they are frightened,
if they also grieve,
let them comfort one another,
I cannot help them, I am riding
each enormous wave of this absence
that knows no further shore."
"If they are frightened,
if they also grieve,
let them comfort one another,
I cannot help them, I am riding
each enormous wave of this absence
that knows no further shore."
The Last Nude by Ellis Avery
3.0
Wants to be Sarah Waters but doesn't have the nearly the same eye for detail. A better comp would be Rupert Thomson’s Never Anyone but You, but honestly it pales in comparison to even that. The prose is entirely unmemorable and conceptually it's almost vapid but hey it's about queer women painters in 1920s Paris so I shouldn't really complain lol. At least I had fun
Shadow of Heaven by Ellen Bryant Voigt
3.0
Bit of a letdown after The Forces of Plenty; I think the shorter poems in that collection were more successful. Favorites here were Winter Field, Practice, passages of The Garden, Spring, the Hawk, and The Tattered Dress.
For those hours
I was some other thing, and my body,
which you have long loved well,
did not love you.
For those hours
I was some other thing, and my body,
which you have long loved well,
did not love you.
James by Percival Everett
5.0
Like Erasure, I really responded to the surrealism here, as well as how the layers of meaning and frames to the narrative are wryly pointed out to the reader by the narrator himself. But the relationship between James and Huck here is singular: it's one of the most compelling I've ever come across in a novel. The inevitability of their closeness against the massive societal pulls of their distance speaks to why Everett is one of the few contemporary novelists (especially of those with a satirical/"funny" bend to their writing) that I wholeheartedly love, for he is the most aware of all the contractions being alive, not to mention the contradictions of representation and the written word.
"At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn't even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them, sounding them out or comprehending them. It was a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subversive."
"At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn't even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them, sounding them out or comprehending them. It was a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subversive."
The Forces of Plenty by Ellen Bryant Voigt
4.0
These are really lovely poems, and Eurydice in particular I know I will be returning to a lot. I can see why Voigt and Louise Glück were such good friends. My kind of poets :)
"Orpheus,
standing
between me and iridescent earth,
you turned to verify the hell
I was thrown to, and got what you needed for your songs.
They do not penetrate the grave,
I cannot hear them, I cannot know
how much you mourn."
"Orpheus,
standing
between me and iridescent earth,
you turned to verify the hell
I was thrown to, and got what you needed for your songs.
They do not penetrate the grave,
I cannot hear them, I cannot know
how much you mourn."
The Lice by W.S. Merwin
4.0
Basically what I expected/hoped Wendell Berry would be
Favorites: It Is March, In Autumn, The Dream Again, For the Anniversary of My Death, Fly
"One thing about the living sometimes a piece of us
Can stop dying for a moment
But you the dead
Favorites: It Is March, In Autumn, The Dream Again, For the Anniversary of My Death, Fly
"One thing about the living sometimes a piece of us
Can stop dying for a moment
But you the dead
Once you go into those names you go on you never
Hesitate
You go on"
Hesitate
You go on"
Sweet Machine by Mark Doty
2.0
Maybe I'm dead inside because these did not work for me at all. There needs to be a moratorium on poems about NYC. And pet dogs
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
5.0
Utterly absorbing! And deeply depressing. Nothing is better than the social critique as tragic romance novel. I don't wanna stay at your party / I just wanna be your tugboat captain.....
"He had built up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his secret thoughts and longings. Little by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational activities; thither he brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him, his judgments and his visions. Outside it, in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency, blundering against familiar prejudices and traditional points of view as an absent-minded man goes on bumping into the furniture of his own room. Absent-that was what he was: so absent from everything most densely real and near to those about him that it sometimes startled him to find they still imagined he was there."
"He had built up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his secret thoughts and longings. Little by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational activities; thither he brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him, his judgments and his visions. Outside it, in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency, blundering against familiar prejudices and traditional points of view as an absent-minded man goes on bumping into the furniture of his own room. Absent-that was what he was: so absent from everything most densely real and near to those about him that it sometimes startled him to find they still imagined he was there."
Billy Budd, Sailor by Herman Melville
3.0
Honestly mostly just made me want to reread the power of the dog lol