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Four and Twenty

Photo: A Murder of Crows by Jesse Weinstein (Creative Commons)

The crows were in the trees again, crowding the branches with ruffled feathers. Mara watched them watching her. She plucked a blueberry from the unfinished pie filling in front of her and popped the berry in her mouth, then sucked the purple juice from her fingers.

After wiping her hands on her apron, she dusted flour over the rolling pin and cutting board and slammed a fresh ball of pie dough down. It flattened under her rolling pin, bit by bit. When became sticky and clung to the rolling pin, she breathed slowly and dusted the pin with more flour just as her mother had taught her. It had taken her twenty-four tries roll out the bottom layer of crust alone and fit it neatly into the pan. She thought if she screwed this one up, she might scream.

“The trick is in the crust,” Mara’s mother used to say. “Pie filling is great, but the crust is where the magic is.”

Continue reading “Four and Twenty”

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Poetry Win! Live From The Homesick Jamboree!

6998642I just learned that I’ve won a copy of Live From The Homesick Jamboree by Adrian Blevins! Yay!

Summary from GoodReads:

Live from the Homesick Jamboree is a brave, brash, funny, and tragic hue and cry on growing up female during the 1970s, “when everything was always so awash” that the speaker finds herself adrift among adults who act like children. The book moves from adolescence through a dry-eyed, poignant exploration of two marriages, motherhood, and the larger world, with the headlong perceptiveness and brio characteristic of Adrian Blevins’s work. This poetry is plainspoken and streetwise, brutal and beautiful, provocative and self-incriminating, with much musicality and a corrosive bravura, brilliantly complicated by bursts of vernacular language and flashes of compassion. Whether listening to Emmylou Harris while thinking she should be memorizing Tolstoy, reflecting on her “full-to-bursting motherliness,” aging body, the tensions and lurchings of a relationship, or “the cockamamie lovingness” of it all, the language flies fast and furious.

I’m stoked to read this. Poetry is joy afterall. (^_^)

The book was offered by Joseph Harker as part of the Big Poetry Giveaway.

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Books read in April

1. The City & The City, China Miéville (one of the best I’ve read this year)
2. Creepers, by David Morrell
3. The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights, Volume 1
4. Criss Cross by Lynne Rae Perkins
5. lost boy lost girl, by Peter Straub
6. Camouflage, by Joe Haldeman
7. The Tale of Despereaux, by Kate DiCamillo
8. The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas
9. Hourglass Museum (poetry), by Kelli Russell Agodon
10. The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi

REVIEWS (behind the cut): Continue reading “Books read in April”

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Lethargy breeds lethargy.

“Lethargy. It’s a word I know, because it’s in one of my father’s favorite expressions. Lethargy breeds lethargy. It means the more you lie around doing nothing, the more you want to lie around doing nothing. Your limbs and your mind feel so heavy that it becomes a major effort just to lift your arm to channel surf.”
― Neal Shusterman, Dread Locks

As I idled away the weekend, avoiding any opportunity or incentive to do anything, it started to become clear to me that I was in a lethargy cycle that I’m having a hard time escaping. I don’t even want to write out goals, because I know I won’t do them, but I also know that by not setting goals, I have no reason to accomplish anything. Gah.

I am reading quite a lot, which I consider a form of forward progress. But if it weren’t for the adorableness of the Little Monster, who’s parents invited me out to lunch, I might not have changed out of my pajamas or left the house all weekend. (While that’s not a bad thing in and of itself, I usually find I need to get out at least a little to feel healthy and balanced.)

So, in the absence of having any new about my personal goals to share with you, here are a couple of cool things on the interwebs:

  • The flash fiction, journal NaNo Fiction is celebrating National Short Story Month by posting flash stories with an accompanying prompt to get writers writing. I keep telling myself that I need to play with flash fiction more, since it’s close to poetry in terms of tightness of narrative.