PDF Copy for Printing © 2007
Stones of Erasmus — Just plain good writing, teaching, thinking, doing, making, being, dreaming, seeing, feeling, building, creating, reading
8.4.07
Poem: "Crucifix"
Labels:
christianity,
poem,
poetry
I am an educator and a writer. I was born in Louisiana and I now live in the Big Apple. My heart beats to the rhythm of "Ain't No Place to Pee on Mardi Gras Day". My style is of the hot sauce variety. I love philosophy sprinkles and a hot cup of café au lait.
15.3.07
Book Review: "The Farming of Bones"
Edwidge Danticat's novel Farming of Bones |
The novel is a study in trauma: using sensuous language Danticat writes the body in pain. Like a patient in therapy, when the story is retold, the subsequent retellings of the story, four things happen.
- The body remembers. This is why Amabelle says, “This past is more like flesh than air; our stories testimonials …” (281).
- The story, as a testimonial, repeated and retold differently and with divergent perspectives, with an occasional interpretation by the therapist is revisited.
- The third consequence of this telling is a recognition that the story is held in tension with the official story — here the story told by the Dominican victors against that which is held in the heart of survivors or lost forever with the dead.
- The language acts as a kind of counter-narrative to the anger and hatred against the black, coffee-colored, bodies of the Haitians.
Labels:
books,
Books & Literature,
colonial literature,
fiction,
haiti,
literature,
novel,
trauma,
violence,
world literature
I am an educator and a writer. I was born in Louisiana and I now live in the Big Apple. My heart beats to the rhythm of "Ain't No Place to Pee on Mardi Gras Day". My style is of the hot sauce variety. I love philosophy sprinkles and a hot cup of café au lait.
7.3.07
Book Review: The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist
Labels:
book review,
Books & Literature,
criticism,
israel,
literature,
palestine
I am an educator and a writer. I was born in Louisiana and I now live in the Big Apple. My heart beats to the rhythm of "Ain't No Place to Pee on Mardi Gras Day". My style is of the hot sauce variety. I love philosophy sprinkles and a hot cup of café au lait.
6.3.07
Poem: "Oranges in my mailbox"
I am not a man of pleasure
— it has been denied me —
(save for an orange in my mailbox
and a shave of savon in my bath)
For when I go to touch pleasure I only find
a vaporous warmth, a verdant void,
thinned out ecstasy, lightly veined
things,
for those things, those real things
are forbidden to me —
for with a hair shirt for a mind
and a brazen wooden lenten bowl for desire,
I shall not have pleasure,
even with
an elevator to take me several floors,
air conditioning massaging my cell,
and an orange in my mailbox
— it has been denied me —
(save for an orange in my mailbox
and a shave of savon in my bath)
For when I go to touch pleasure I only find
a vaporous warmth, a verdant void,
thinned out ecstasy, lightly veined
things,
for those things, those real things
are forbidden to me —
for with a hair shirt for a mind
and a brazen wooden lenten bowl for desire,
I shall not have pleasure,
even with
an elevator to take me several floors,
air conditioning massaging my cell,
and an orange in my mailbox
Greig Roselli © 2007 PDF Copy for Printing
I am an educator and a writer. I was born in Louisiana and I now live in the Big Apple. My heart beats to the rhythm of "Ain't No Place to Pee on Mardi Gras Day". My style is of the hot sauce variety. I love philosophy sprinkles and a hot cup of café au lait.
24.2.07
Poem: "Portraits"
I am an educator and a writer. I was born in Louisiana and I now live in the Big Apple. My heart beats to the rhythm of "Ain't No Place to Pee on Mardi Gras Day". My style is of the hot sauce variety. I love philosophy sprinkles and a hot cup of café au lait.
5.1.07
Poem: "brother & sister"
she’s a waif about to vomit her bread,
to get ready for the Banana Republic shoot,
the “I love it when you look at me” pose.
she’s singularly angular, positioned on a bar,
her brother at her side,
singing glad hallelujahs to the boys passing by.
Everyone loves a stare, a glance, une regarde,
but this gal wallows in it,
lapping up the paparazzi shots, the mental
undressing behind the pews.
She loves it;
she’s sick,
or possibly stuck in a Truffaut film.
he loves it,
complete.
And we are so sick that we stare anyway,
because we know he, she, they love it.
the “I love it when you look at me” pose.
she’s singularly angular, positioned on a bar,
her brother at her side,
singing glad hallelujahs to the boys passing by.
Everyone loves a stare, a glance, une regarde,
but this gal wallows in it,
lapping up the paparazzi shots, the mental
undressing behind the pews.
She loves it;
she’s sick,
or possibly stuck in a Truffaut film.
he loves it,
complete.
And we are so sick that we stare anyway,
because we know he, she, they love it.
Labels:
christianity,
poem,
poetry,
siblings
I am an educator and a writer. I was born in Louisiana and I now live in the Big Apple. My heart beats to the rhythm of "Ain't No Place to Pee on Mardi Gras Day". My style is of the hot sauce variety. I love philosophy sprinkles and a hot cup of café au lait.
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