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sydneyzahradka's review
His body was barely cold when the suitors swooped in on the young widow, the ground
was still fresh over the grave, it was spring, the president had been shot a few months earlier,
nests mocked the gravedigger's work, the suitors swooped in from all directions like carrion
birds, the first an oval-headed man from across the road with dirty phone calls the night
after the funeral, then one cornered her in the garage by the bag of her husband's clothes,
and two brothers peeked in the windows and tapped on them like woodpeckers, and the school
ring salesman, and the old man who looked like Colonel Sanders, and Al, her friend's husband
from Wabash, Indiana, while his wife was strapped down getting shock treatments, and the small
man with a big voice who pawed in the night at the screen door like a bear roaring her name,
just a few months earlier she'd watched the president's funeral on television, there was Black
Jack, riderless horse, boots set backwards in the stirrups, and the president's widow, walking
straight-spined under a black veil, and now the robins hopped as they always had, their songs
like a tangle of string in the air, and how did she fend them off, the suitors, and go to college,
and read Ulysses, and write papers on that manual typewriter, and feed us, my sister and me?
was still fresh over the grave, it was spring, the president had been shot a few months earlier,
nests mocked the gravedigger's work, the suitors swooped in from all directions like carrion
birds, the first an oval-headed man from across the road with dirty phone calls the night
after the funeral, then one cornered her in the garage by the bag of her husband's clothes,
and two brothers peeked in the windows and tapped on them like woodpeckers, and the school
ring salesman, and the old man who looked like Colonel Sanders, and Al, her friend's husband
from Wabash, Indiana, while his wife was strapped down getting shock treatments, and the small
man with a big voice who pawed in the night at the screen door like a bear roaring her name,
just a few months earlier she'd watched the president's funeral on television, there was Black
Jack, riderless horse, boots set backwards in the stirrups, and the president's widow, walking
straight-spined under a black veil, and now the robins hopped as they always had, their songs
like a tangle of string in the air, and how did she fend them off, the suitors, and go to college,
and read Ulysses, and write papers on that manual typewriter, and feed us, my sister and me?
motifenjoyer's review
emotional
reflective
sad
4.0
"that we can enter a body through its many
mouths but we cannot stay, there is no staying, to be a woman and to desire
with elegance has been for me impossible, to be a girl stumbling upon desire
like a rock along the footpath meant falling clumsily and breaking like a mirror,"
mouths but we cannot stay, there is no staying, to be a woman and to desire
with elegance has been for me impossible, to be a girl stumbling upon desire
like a rock along the footpath meant falling clumsily and breaking like a mirror,"
hallieelizabeth's review
dark
emotional
funny
reflective
sad
4.25
incredible. compulsively readable, lyrical, sonic, breathtaking, heartbreaking, relatable, specific, dense, referential. great book to read and great form to try out!
casparb's review
i'm one of the penultimates that didn't get to this yet & my my my I was three poems in and said yeah, pulitzer deserved. This really blows it all out of the water. unbelievable !