Interiors

"#179 When I imagine a celibate man-especially one who doesn't even jerk off- I wonder how he related to his dick: what else he does with it, how he handles it, how he regards it. At first glance, this same question for a woman might appear "tucked away" (pussy-as-absence, pussy-as-lack: out of sight, out of mind). But I am inclined to think that anyone who thinks or talks this way has simply never felt the pulsing of a pussy in serious need of fucking- a pulsing that communicates nothing less than the suckings and ejaculations of the heart."

Be careful carrying these books around with you. They’re small, and perfect for casually reading, a few minutes at a time, when you find yourself commuting on the subway or waiting for someone to bring you food in a small cafe. Perfectly sized for your handbag, or to carry to work, and spaced out evenly so that you can pick them up, put them down, and even read out of sequence throughout the course of your day. The caveat though: you might end up crying in public. It’s an odd sight, at 3am, on the L train heading home after work to see someone crying holding a book of poetry. It even makes the drunk young people uneasy. Especially alarming to the people sitting next to you in a cafe, watching big, heavy, mom-sized tears rolling down your face. 
Bluets by Maggie Nelson is a perfect read for anyone who’s ever had their heart broken. Or has had to break someone else’s heart, or has been in love with the world too sharply, or fallen out of love with it, or even been in love with a word, as something as simple as a color. Her meditation on Blue is a compelling exercise with theme: each bluet is numbered, and while one might mention flowers, the next will pull the thread, maybe it will be about the painter who talked about the flowers. So there is extreme precision of flow, of each short prose block (or poem) leading into the next. As a whole, it should still be considered a book of poetry, but alone, each bluet could be a poem or a short essay. There are things I always think of as being blue, but Nelson also brings up all these other blues, like the underside of her friends foot after an accident. 

"#198. In a 1994 interview, about twenty years after he wrote, “Famous Blue Raincoat,” Cohen admitted that he could no longer remember the specifics of the love triangle that the song describes. “I always felt that there was an invisible male seducing the woman I was with, now whether that one was incarnate or merely imaginary I don’t remember.” I find this forgetting quite heartening, and quite tragic, in turns"
 
So many people are represented in the book, from Cohen to Thoreau, and not just Americans but also French painters and Greek philosophers. An incredible amount of research must have gone into Bluets, and yet the book reads as simply, and is as digestible, as a perfect, light blue macaroon. 
Perhaps a more traditional book of poetry, but still following a much longer narrative than it might appear for such a small book, is Kimiko Hahn’s The Narrow Road to the Interior. In Bluets there’s a loose narrative of a heartbreak, of a severed relationship, but the narrative in Hahn’s book is her as a mother, and even her as an adult woman balancing divorce and lovers, how that still reflected on her motherhood. Most of the poems are incredibly simple, “I’ve decided to climb the rocks beyond the stand of pine to find the insect that clicks like an old-fashioned toy.” Highly steeped in nature, most of the things written in this book are thoughts she’s had while outside or while apart from her daughters. This is a form of Japanese poetry called Tanka, single lines and the use of seasons and nature. Most of the writing seems to be reflections of Basho, Kawabata Yusunari, and Shikibu. Writers I’m not familiar with, but understand to be tied in very closely with the author's identity as a writer. It’s a beautiful collection of poems and often left me in tears late at night, too late to call my mom. 

"This afternoon H heard something in my voice and asked me, What’s wrong? Anything wrong? And I said, I miss my mother. But I think I’ve always missed my mother. Sometimes I just lie down on the floor and cry, Mommy Mommy."

As a woman with a close relationship with my mother, and as someone who doesn’t know if they will be able to have children (timing, not biology) the book resonated with me. It’s an amazing portrait of a complete woman, with her desires, her annoyances, shortcomings and loves. And just as all these things are complicated, different, incongruent, so is the style of the book. Poetry, journal entries, private and public thoughts, and prose, all complete the final picture. 

Moving Across the World on Horses

“Moving across the world on horses / body split at the edge of their necks / neck sweat eating at my jeans / moving across the world on horses.”*



Out in the country. The real country. The middle of Florida, in the Ocala National Forest, where the only restaurant is a Kangaroo gas station. You could stay barefoot for a whole week and no one would notice. Humidity like a blanket. White sand and forest and Coca-Cola lakes.The guy that owned the ranch was a horse thief. Really. He sold people horses and then took them back in the middle of the night and then painted them different colors. They would come back to the ranch and he would say oh no, you’re mistaken. I think he was one of my dad’s only friends, and we kept our horses there. I spent weekends there for maybe two years. I was twelve, at one point, for sure. We would ride our horses all day under the giant oak trees and through blonde fields and sometimes across lakes, and come out dripping and relieved from the summer heat. Horse dust in my mouth. The smell of horses in everything. Even now if I smell horses, driving through the country with the windows down I have this homesick feeling for them. Then I was just a kid, I thought it was totally normal and granted that I would spend my days and nights outside forever. When my dad would go to sleep I would walk around the little ranch. The black lake looked blacker, and even I knew better than to swim in it at night. Horses aren’t afraid of snakes, they have a natural immunity. That’s true. But they are afraid of hogs and pigs. Avoiding the lake, I would walk (barefoot) up the sandy road to the pasture and stay still, wait for the horses to come to me. We smelled each other. When I walked back to the little cabin I would hear them, very quietly though, walking along the pasture, following me. That was our friendship. Recognition and presence. I would go back and sit on the porch and listen to all the bugs. A whole world of creatures making one noise in the night. In the morning we would go ride out again, my dad usually leading the way trying to find some trail he made up in his head. In the afternoons it might rain and I would walk to where the horses were just to see the steam coming up off them, to put my head against their neck and rub their wet fur, both of us probably thinking: I am here. 

*The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ongaatje