The Last Book I Loved: Re-reading Dana Levin’s Banana Palace in 2019
In such a context, Dana Levin’s particular apocalypses deserve another look.
...moreIn such a context, Dana Levin’s particular apocalypses deserve another look.
...moreThe poem is no longer a part of the book I own. I ripped it out, had it framed, and nailed it to the wall right next to the door in our master bedroom.
...moreIt is March, almost April, and the year feels like a spool of days spliced out of order, leaping treacherously from sun to ice to sun to rain to snow.
...moreThrough incisive and uncompromising verse, Reyes unearths the hypocrisy at work in exalted American democracy…
...moreBy drawing us into his childhood, Maxwell shows us how to revisit our own. We become the storytellers of our own lives.
...moreAfter what seems like a lifetime of bracing and bottling, I’ve gotten closer to settling my fourth-grade trauma.
...moreSummer works like this. Every day small moments cycle like waves within tides, eroding our opportunities on a geological scale invisible from our point of immersion.
...moreI recognize something in the stories… It’s the culture of “I made it” versus the culture of staying behind, the culture of achievement versus the culture of guilt.
...moreBut when my loneliness feels as vast—and capable of drowning me—as the sea, this book about self-destruction comforts me more than any self-help.
...moreIn the distance between me and the story, I can see all the ways I would have to change without technology, because of all the ways technology has already changed me.
...moreI wanted what Ari wanted: affirmation that I could be a good mother while making mistakes and having ugly, difficult thoughts.
...moreReading Solo Faces, I felt like I was peering into a life Matt and I once longed for, one I never entered completely.
...moreNone of us has telepathy, and even the most empathetic of us can’t really experience the world as another person experiences it. So we read essays and memoirs.
...moreWhat makes a person who they are? Is evil born or made?
...moreI’d been treated for cancer, left my husband, patched things up, and just as life was veering back towards Normalville, it took a headlong swerve.
...moreI’ve been drawn to Morrison lately because I’ve been thinking about historical and social wakes as I’ve felt the swaying of the ones I’m in.
...moreI have a tendency to read difficult books when my life is difficult.
...more“Did everyone but her have a daddy?” Why—at age three—would you weep for a parent you didn’t have and had never known? I didn’t buy it.
...moreIn letter-writing, we are not really talking, but the words represent the deep-heldness of our communication.
...moreDuring the eight months he was sentenced to Rikers Island, a poet named Lauren Ireland wrote postcards to Lil Wayne. The rapper never responded, but the writer compiled them into a tiny purple book.
...moreSome deep part of me thinks that this is all poetry is, at best: a clear record of a moment where something catches.
...moreI couldn’t wait to read it, but I was also infinitely patient. It’s that delayed gratification thing. I’m a sucker for it, and there are books that are worth the wait.
...moreI was so very tired of being judged and dismissed. The more others pressed their expectations upon me, the more I turned to tattooing to protest.
...moreAbout a month ago, I found Seven Nights in a moving box. I sat down on the basement floor, started reading, and got flung back to that amazing train ride from Chicago to Houston.
...moreBernadette Fox is awesome, but she is also kind of losing it, and I get it.
...moreDickinson realizes that hope shifts and flutters and changes within you.
...moreThey don’t usually realize that every line, every word of a poem, is there because the poet consciously chose that word instead of some other one.
...more“And I think you’d like this,” he said, bringing out a book for me. “My mother wrote it.” I thought: Oh, shit.
...more1982 was a shitty year. I was 9 years old and in the 4th grade in Appleton, Wisconsin. My parents were going through a nasty divorce, the kind of thing you see on Jerry Springer.
...moreSuddenly I understood more deeply what the end of the poem means, when the speaker knows his decisions will change his life, but still has no idea what else may come as a result.
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