The poems in Naming the Rose draw from vulnerable, autobiographical elements mixed with the obliviousness of those around the speaker. The two-sectioned poem “The Light of Day” contrasts loving memories of pumpkin carving by the speaker’s daughter with the fear of the speaker-mother as her partner and the father of her daughter, “drunk,” “too drunk,” “rid[es] down the highway at 90 miles an hour” with “a huge stolen pumpkin on [her] lap.”
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This collection of poems explores the fracture of a marriage after a secret is revealed—a husband’s closeted homosexuality, at odds with his religious upbringing and the life he has built. Set against the pastoral backdrop of stables and gardens, canning jars and roving horses, tether & lung traverses the landscape of loss and longing with striking vulnerability.
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The world seems full of mystery, her best friend seems an exquisite one, and makes her feel as though, at forty-six, while life is often mundane and monotonous, full of the known and expected, somehow, you could find yourself emerging from an inflatable vagina, really, that’s what this thing was, in a haunted house in the middle of Iowa.
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The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
Unlike dementia, infant loss doesn’t induce a lingering forgetfulness. The pain of the birth, the fear of seeing Sophia’s tiny red body, the way her skin tore as she rolled on my chest, the slowing of her chest rising and falling, the doctor calling her time of death—remembering it all again was torture.
“Why don’t we come to an agreement then? I’ll buy the alcohol if you finally stop working.” Hassan said as he sipped his Scotch and watched her with his psychologist’s stare. She had the uneasy feeling she was a frog in his pot, and he was slowly turning up the heat.
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On their first date, my friend’s fiancée talked about her job. She’s a mortician. She prepares cadavers for a funeral, cremation, or whatever is decided. She cleans the cadavers and replaces their blood with pink embalming fluid. If she has to apply makeup, she does. She thinks of herself as an artist. She makes clean portraits. She said that word a lot. Cadavers.
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In both cases—the poem and the trembling couple—I seem to love the very thing that raises questions for me in my own life: I love how settled the pizza eaters and the bean eaters are with each other.
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The beauty of code is instant gratification: I implement a feature, I test the feature, I see it work or fail.
(nonfiction)
Another Chicago Magazine 