BOOK REVIEWS: 2 poetry and 1 nonfiction: I wrote 'n published this year

The Cow with the Subtle Nose by Jean Dubuffet, 1954.

The three reviews I wrote and published this year (one more to come, most likely in October):

Wedlocked: the Perils of Marriage Equality by Katherine Francke, at Lambda  "Comparing African-American rights with LBGT rights is risky. Is it too strong to say that every group and individual with a grievance feels free to compare their plight to that of people-of-color’s? Everyone’s pain is real, absolutely and unequivocally, but the stories don’t always line up. My argument is illustrated by the two couples portrayed on the book jacket."

Trance by Debora Lidov, on Luna Luna Magazine                                                  "Debora Lidov’s short collection, Trance (Finishing Line Press, $14.49), contains poems of surprise, elegance, originality, wit, irony, beauty, dark humor, precision, pain, and lyricism. That is a long praise-list and could set up a reader for impossibly elevated expectations, but the high-stakes’ focus of these poems makes anything less than a full layout of its attributes a little lame."

Cancer Angel by Beth Murray, at Lambda                                                             "Murray’s is poetry that makes the body holy, that illuminates the dark. Diagnosed with advanced breast cancer when she was in her forties, Murray didn’t “struggle with it”-–a phrase often used to frame cancer patients’ experience of the disease. This sharp poet sidesteps, well, more like leaps over sentimentality or cliché. The images can be searing. In “scar,” for instance, the defacement speaks for itself, literally and brazenly: “scar across my chest says have done battle// scar across my chest says have been cut.”

A Few Reviews (by me) Lately Published, Plus I'm Unicornless No More

This unicorn has no relationship to anything
but my blog was hitherto without a unicorn,
an omission now rectified.

Howdy, all.

Recently-ish I reviewed two poetry collections and a novel for Lambda.

‘Buddha in My Belly’ by Brittany K. Fonte

Posted on October 29, 2012 by Sarah Sarai

If Roseanne Barr wrote prose poems, they wouldn’t be so very different from those in Buddha in My Belly, Brittany K. Fonte’s debut collection (Hopewell Publications, 2012).  Like Barr’s routines, these pieces are sardonic, honest—and about women. Sometimes it’s hard to be one. Okay, that was Tammy. Anyway.   (more…)

Lady Business: A Celebration of Lesbian Poetry’ edited by Bryan Borland

Posted on August 22, 2012 by Sarah Sarai

A dozen long-stemmed red roses? Ho hum. How 50s heterosexual can you get?  It’s not that I’m disenchanted with roses, their heady fragrance and dizzying blend of fragility and toughness. It’s just, well, I love me some variety. (more…)

AND . . . a novel by an Australian writer . . .

‘My Sister Chaos’ by Lara Fergus

Posted on June 17, 2012 by Sarah Sarai in Fiction, Reviews

The world of My Sister Chaos (Triangle Publishing’s  Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction winner and a finalist for this year’s Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Debut Fiction) is disconcerting.  Always near the surface of this quiet and speculative methodical tale is the fact that we are in a time of crisis. (more…)

Enjoy!

Thanks to Roxane Gay for Adding a Few Years to My Life

(The Rumpus used a very cool abacus,
as illustration. Different clip art,
above, but same concept.)

I suppose if I were to keep a daily accounting of how I spend my time I would be forced to acknowledge hours and hours devoted to FUMING. I get rankled, lots.

For Example.  Recently. My entire cranium, except for portions assigned to personal hygiene and paying nominal attention to cabs steering toward me at crosswalks, has had within it the 84th Academy Awards.  Did you see it?

Did you?  Do you remember?  I do. A humongous auditorium of the beautiful (fair enough) and young (okay, what's new) and all white (what!!!!!!!!!). 

What the Academy, the liberal Hollywood elite, presented, quite accurately given its track record within its gated and red-carpeted community, was the essentially all-white event representing an essentially all-white medium.  Sure, sure, sure.  I celebrated Olivia Spencer's Oscar. I haven't seen The Help but reliable friends tell me was terrific. (I can't imagine any actress better than Viola Davis, but, whatever.) I ha ha ha-ed at Chris Rock. He is very, very funny.

But really. Tell me you didn't see a sea, an ocean, the planet before the seas were parted, of white people.  Tell me t.v. listings don't reveal overwhelming white casting. Tell me movies don't recycle the same white actors over and over. I AM SO TIRED OF THOSE SAME THIRTY-SOMETHING FORTY-SOMETHING SO-CALLED FUNNY GUYS IN EVERY MOVIE I COULD, well, get peeved. Gender inequity is also legion, yup, but my concern here is race.  I am  dumbfounded at Hollywood's racism, support for Obama notwithstanding. (Another topic.)

I don't have high blood pressure but other essential elements of my intimate chemistries are stressed as I, every day, think about my beloved movies so abused.  In fact, I'm ashamed for my country. Hollyqoos sure isn't representing my world or America's world.

So that was the example.  The case-in-point is the New York Times Book Review. I stopped reading it with any regularity a few years back. I didn't want to, over and over, expose myself to its chosen cosmos of over 90 percent white (male) writers.  That's not my cosmos.  Whatever "white" means by the NYT reckoning, it doesn't even represent me (and I'm "white") (I'm even one-quarter "Caucasian").

Writer and professor and generally cool, not to mention astute, social critic Roxane Gay looked at the stats. You can read her critique of the NYT in her The Rumpus article, Where Things Stand.  For instance, to quote Gay:

Of those 742 [books reviewed], 655 were written by Caucasian authors (1 transgender writer, 437 men, and 217 women). Thirty-one were written by Africans or African Americans (21 men, 10 women), 9 were written by Hispanic authors (8 men, 1 woman), 33 by Asian, Asian-American or South Asian writers (19 men, 14 women), 8 by Middle Eastern writers (5 men, 3 women) and 6 were books written by writers whose racial background we were simply unable to identify.

The Internet, by way of access to so many sharp news sources, is robbing The Times of its "paper of record" status. Thank you, Internet. Ho hum, NYT. And thank you, Roxane Gay. Secrets and unspoken truths are unhealthy to body and spirit, corpus and soul. I don't know how efficacious truth is, but without, we get no where new.

Review: The Diary of Emily Dickinson (1993)

From 1993. This was my first book review for The Seattle Times. (I freelanced for them my last years in Seattle.) Why now?

There is no expiration date on the written word.  (photo info below)

 

The Diary Of Emily Dickinson

By Sarah Sarai
"The Diary of Emily Dickinson" by Jamie Fuller Mercury House, $18 (also in paper)

Believe you have a flame burning inside you; it fuels your love of hiking, writing, helping. Now imagine a flame in someone even greater than yourself.

That act of imagining is what Jamie Fuller has done in this fictional 1867-68 diary of the brilliant American poet, Emily Dickinson. Fuller has fashioned entries that easily could have drifted from Emily's hand. From the sloping typeface to the line drawings of the daily events of Emily's life - house, flowers, pen and ink - the entire book is a lovely re-creation of a volume that never existed.

The entries are annotated with biographical information, and fiction and fact cooperate: The reader is offered a gentle opportunity to learn more about the life, times and thoughts of Emily.

But most of all it is a chance to witness an artist privately discussing her work, with Emily explaining, usually plausibly, some of the mysteries of her life. Why did she wear only white? Whom did she love? Why was she so reclusive? In this fine historical fiction, Emily Dickinson nestles into the reader's thoughts, stoking the imagination's fires for some time to come.
__________________
Sarah Sarai, first published in The Seattle Times
The Diary of Emily Dickinson is in hardback or paper on Amazon and elsewhere.

photo by Jonathan Morse. See more or contact Jonathan through The Art Part.

Writing by hand, online, typing drafts: untenable - and good - examples

Once a poem’s online I forget about it. In once sense only that’s a blessing, and I’m not sure there’s much sense in that sense because a poem is a thoughtful creation, crafted, not a geyser of emotion or cleverness, erupted.

I have posted a few unpublished poems on this blog, and in a few cases typed first runs right in. And then forgotten about them. What’s the point?

With rare exception, I work on and over and in poems as long as requested. With NO exception (except a few on this blog as mentioned previously) I write first drafts of poems by hand, then type, print, edit, type, print, edit . . . And when there’s nothing else to be done I send out the poem. Sometimes I send the poem to Siberia, a file where poems that just don’t work live. They are warm and fed but their biospheric life does not include guests. Kafka’s messenger never reaches them and they don’t care. These poems aren’t sullen. They’re differently abled and know it.

A poem submitted to a journal is most often rejected at least once and when I get it back I take another look, ask if it wants to get off the bench and back in the game (Look, Ma! I wrote a sports reference!) or needs a massage. Maybe an amputation.

However, as far as prose and nonfiction are concerned, this blog unstuffs me and that’s been a great victory.

Most reviews I’ve posted here were typed into the blog and “published” or gone live. I might spy a typo or stupid sentence construction and go back in to fix. It’s not like the blog is a dangerous mine and reentry risks life.

When I wrote reviews as a freelancer for The Seattle Times each one took an enormous amount of time. I was utterly convinced I was a slow writer, no change possible. If my current reviews were worse than those, less insightful or fun or effective in tribute where called for, I’d agree I should return to those awful weeks in front of computer, me trying to hammer out a greater piece of writing than I am capable of creating.

But what I write now, although each could be expanded – now, that’s for sure – is fine. I am writing for a blog, not an journal, and length needn’t be too long. No one’s paying me for this. A few pieces here on my life might claw at me later. They might demand more attention, more words. We’ll see.

No poem is ever done. But some poems, many, are done talking to me and so they live out in the world, make new friends and decisions about me I may not like. That’s the deal.

So no more poems typed into my blog. Only poems pasted from my collection or after they’ve been in print long enough I do no disrespect to the kind journal.