Immersion

Running Away to Home: Our Family's Journey to Croatia in Search of Who We Are, Where We Came From, and What Really Matters 

In running away to home, author Jennifer Wilson 'hungry for connections with land and food and family' sets in search of her ancestral family in a Croatian village with her own family. Although the writing was good, I was straying off the reader path and had to push myself to finish the book. In the end, knowing the history of her ancestors and what she was saved from by her family's immigration she returns with a great sense of gratitude. During her travel, she faces many moments where she is glad for having taken this unthinkable step of moving to an unfamiliar place with its new language but a place where the residents make her feel at home.
With a search specific for her ancestors, the author shows the reader, the history of the region. While that is something a writing maestro might appreciate, it is in this generalization that the story of the search lost its appeal. I am also biased from a reading of  The foremost good fortune  by Susan Conley, where we see a country through the struggles the author goes through in adjusting to a different culture. It could be the rural, low profile culture of Croatia which didnt lend itself to any major revelation.

The Foremost Good Fortune: A Memoir by Susan Conley

Reading TriQuarterly99, Spring/Summer 1997 issue, Kanai Mieko's short story 'When treading on soft earth' I cant help but wonder that I have never read this much description in fiction.
Another Mieko short story - The Rose Tango

I remember reading of Operating instructions by Anne Lamott and picked it up when I found it at used books sale in the library.

Lamott talks about a Sam with one arm. I wonder if this is that wonderful kid, embracing the tennis racquet all out.

Sandtray therapy
lomilomi massage
Bouvier puppy
odie dall
plastic Beatrix Potter bath book

Childhood

If we could write as children, how much of the world we could store.

Stories

Why we love them as kids?
Watching The Ballad of Josie, I am reminded of a story similar to How much land does a man need but in an Arabic setting.
We know of the world through them.

In Words, not swords the author introduces us to yeki bud yeki nabud. The jacket art with clad women on the shore reminds me of a colony of shorebirds.

The Forbidden stitch

Sujata Bhatt Muliebrity
Autumn Gardening is a great story which fills survivors with a sense of purpose. It is interesting to see how the sentences work too, with the physical actuations of the character punctuated by the happenings in the emotional landscape.
Compare Khalil's lines in To rise above with Blake's Chminey Sweeper. I came across this Blake poem in Morning,Noon and Night by Arnold Weinstein
picture bride

Carol Bly

I came across Carol Bly's 'My Dear Republican Mother' essay in 'From Daughters to Mothers book.
Reading it I felt thatthis is the kind of work, editors are talking of when they talk about work with layers in it. While she is writing about the mother she knew for the first 12 years of her life, its also about the times then, the presence or lack of psychological attitudes. At the language level, she translates the behavior of people then into the terms of psychology that we use now to recognise them.

Gloria Gervitz
Milagro in from From Shejarit.

Totems fusing together
on poetry

Tarahumara
Chicha
pinole
peyote
Baldachin
Sudarium
Monstrance
Crepitation
Bambina - girl
Bambino -little boy

The tricks pictures play

When I saw a thumbnail of this picture, I recognised the figure of a man and when itwent with the words..'In this novel an assimilated Australian Jew chooses a vicious, and symbolic, husband.' then I corrected myself of the main character and a close look reveals the larger figure of a woman.

I am looking for the saddest thing, which once found
will never be lost again, because it will follow me
- Seductive sadness winks at me

In I called, called to the lashing waves, the end ties with the beginning.

Oscar Hahn's poem 'Places are neither here no there' on wishing hard. In 'The center of the bedroom', 'something' that takes a form but has been present even before identified as something - 'the sad snow this year's dirty snow'.

Antidote against medicine

As the water boils with bitter pink tonic
on a kerosene wick stove
dad cuts the apple
so the sweet apple
can leave a good taste

I direct a pill into my
mouth followed by a waterfall
A friend says its easier
for the pill to go down
after you store some water
in the mouth

Dissolved

A Mom puts a
disk shaped tablet
in a spoon of milk

the bitter medicine
is now
ready to be evaded
by an unwilling baby
oscillating the mouth
from side to side

Leapboard:
Lihn began to break it up with a spoon
Because I wrote by Enrique Lihn
Archilocus

Handy kerchief

A Handkerchief dropped
from a window onto
the seat can
hold your place
A handkerchief can
be knotted to hold
apples that you
didnt plan on buying
until your eyes fell
on them or tomatoes
that zing up your
curry

on a day other than
sunday when you are
out without a grocery bag.

Leapboard:
My whole sea is white scarves/kerchiefs

Handkerchiefs of air are slowly being spun
Jaime Sabines, With Nerves trailing poem

My first rainbow cloud

Driving west in the evening
a cloud has two colors of a
rainbow

May be its the sun light
But the sun is on the left

When I rushed home to take a picture
it was no longer there

In the morning I woke
up thinking its rain
it must be the sprinklers

Antigone poem by Claribel Alegria
Creon and Polyneices.