Intimacy unhinged, unpaddocked me. I didn’t want it.
…And then it came like an ice cream truck with its weird
tinkling music, its sweet frost.
--Diane Seuss
My poetry teacher Judyth Hill turned me on to this writer who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. She is known for having deconstructed or resurrected the sonnet, depending on your point of view. It's poetry for those who don't read poetry. The pieces in this book read to me more like flash fictions in a memoir of childhood; little poetic memories, that take your breath away with their raw insights, unflagging honesty and twists of ecstatic verbiage. I love them, love flash writing, for its brevity and intensity and hard scrabble for some deeper truth, having done some myself in my upcoming book, The Weeping Degree. Reading frank, which is very frank by the way, I find I’m turning down pages as I go and rereading passages over and over. In one sonnet we start out with a crab and end out with a child’s face plant in a man's belly. The swings are dizzying and profound. It's a book about growing up weird, what’s not to like? #fridayreads @dseuss @kellywattauthor
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