I finished “While I Was Gone
Category Archives: Reading
‘What We Need’
American Life in Poetry: Column 055
By Ted Kooser
U.S. poet laureate
A circus is an assemblage of illusions, and here Jo McDougall, a Kansas poet, shows us a couple of performers, drab and weary in their ordinary lives, away from the lights at the center of the ring.
What We Need
It is just as well we do not see,
in the shadows behind the hasty tent
of the Allen Brothers Greatest Show,
Lola the Lion Tamer and the Great Valdini
in Nikes and jeans
sharing a tired cigarette
before she girds her wrists with glistening amulets
and snaps the tigers into rage,
before he adjusts the glimmering cummerbund
and makes from air
the white and trembling doves, the pair.From “Dirt,” Autumn House Press, Pittsburgh, 2001. Copyright (c) 2001 by Jo McDougall, whose most recent book is “Satisfied With Havoc,” Autumn House Press, 2004. Reprinted by permission of the author and Autumn House Press. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
"The Language of Baklava"
This is a very well-crafted book. Unfortunately, I read the “praise for” section before I started reading this, and now I can’t think of anything to say other than to parrot what’s already been said. Such as, it’s a “beguiling and wistful Arab-American memoir [that] offers a poignant glimpse of the immigrant’s dueling nostalgias.” Yeah, that’s just what I would’ve said. But the St. Petersburg Times beat me to it.
“Chen shows me how to fit the chopsticks to my fumbling fingers. After a few trembling attempts, I manage to get a small piece of beef to my mouth. I close my eyes and my senses swim in my head. The flavors are so complex and capricious, I don’t know how to make sense of them. … Who would have thought to bring these ingredients, these ways of thinking about food, together in such startling ways?”
“I don’t know what my sisters and cousins and I ever talk about, I only know that we can’t stop laughing. We watch the adults eat, and we laugh some more. We’re not there for the food so much as for the pure electricity of one another’s presence: We could subsist on chewing gum and whistling and running in the fields.”