
I tell you these things because all of those chaps on the left were on my desk and my husband somehow managed to spill an entire cup of coffee on my desk-- an entire freshly poured cup, my friends.
In some kind of chapbook miracle, only one chap actually was dripping. There were a handful of other items covered in coffee, including by some weird karmic fate Dave's forthcoming manuscript from Black Widow Press.
Here's a beautiful example from a Plath poem:
Years Familiar
to Plath
twenty years bred water
waiting in the authentic
fantastic
we waver from ever
the shape intrudes
is closed
is glittering
yet the fabrication is such
that each day disguises many greens
sprouting
like icebergs
on arms that navigate
breaking us
among sacred shatters
I'm a big fan of borrowing as it were and rearranging. I think what we do as poets is see well and "see well again" how to shape and reshape words. I think words work in one poem in one particular way, but the amazing thing about them is that you can try them on and roll them out like your own little dough and then they fit you too. In this chapbook, Langlinais looks at not just poems, but the poems that have shaped her writing. She fits them on to her grief, to her loss, to her sense of how forms change as we change in the world. It turns out that what you need you have and yet you have to take it and make it your own. I'm awed that a book about borrowing and taking then took a bit of the liquid magic that fuels my every morning and made it work as well. It made me look between stains at each word more closely; life is strange.
1 comment:
I've meant for some time to thank you for your comment about my chapbook...I love how the coffee created a physical "spine" on this poem. I appreciate your kind words! - Chantel
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