Search Results for: in my mother's things

December 3, 2022

“One True Poem” by Doug RamspeckPosted by

Doug Ramspeck

ONE TRUE POEM

The deer this time of year are gray. I see them
near the railroad tracks. What I like about them
is how they flee at the first sign they are observed.
But the one today is full-sized, on its side in the bar
ditch, with a white belly, its neck bent, smudges
of red in the snow like dropped handkerchiefs.
I have been thinking about how often my students
arrive at my office to show me poems they have written.
How often they tell the background story, how they
dressed up experience in the skin of a dead deer,
how they splayed themselves in a bar ditch for everyone
to see. Occasionally they weep, wiping their noses
with their fingers, their insides spilling raw at
the roadside, their necks lolling. Sometimes a single
salty drop falls to the handwritten page and stains it,
leaving a blue ink splotch, as though all sorrow
is a smudge. They want to be that poor deer
where the snow is coming down, dropping out
of the sky, making of the body a mound to be buried
in white, the smooth belly the same white as the snow,
as though a deer might enter the landscape, become
the landscape. To be that one true poem, the one
where you bleed a little on the snow. But tomorrow
I will remind my students that there is a weak sun
in this January sky, an old woman with b.o. they stood
behind once while taking the Sacrament, these Ohio
factories with their broken windows and the grass
in summer spilling through the cracks in the cement.
Please, I will say, there is more to write about than dying
grandmothers, a boyfriend who left you, a winning shot
in the state finals, a first sexual experience, an alcoholic
father who made your mother jump once from
a rowboat into Grand Lake St. Mary’s because she’d
forgotten the buns for the hotdogs. Just once let
your poems run wild into the night, like deer rushing
across the road, to feel the aloneness of the body, the way
the legs move and carry us. One last true poem, the one
where the deer is forever by the roadside, the cars
speeding past, how cold and hard the ground feels,
the snow covering us until the rains arrive come spring
and the body transforms gradually to mud. Together,
I will tell them, we will lift that deer from the bar ditch
and tumble it over the edge into the river, like in that
Stafford poem I assigned last week, though my
students all asked the same thing, over and over,
the same thing they always ask: is the story true?

—from Rattle #34, Winter 2010

__________

Doug Ramspeck: “Given the content of ‘One True Poem,’ I feel strangely obliged to confess which parts of my poem are ‘true.’ I did not come across a dead deer before composing the work. My students do tear up sometimes and want everything they write to be confessional. I do plead with them to try something else. One student did write about her mother being forced from a rowboat because she forgot the hotdog buns. I did not assign Stafford to my students. Okay? Okay?” (web)

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July 11, 2023

“Glosa” by Diane SeussPosted by

Diane Seuss

GLOSA

“How miserable I am!” he muttered, “my God, how miserable!” And joy gave way to the boredom of everyday life, and the feeling of irrevocable loss.
—Anton Chekhov, “Typhus”

He took to reading Chekhov late at night
and studied up on Fox Talbot and calotypes.
Watched the History Channel, anything
on Lincoln or the Civil War, Caligula,
who cut off tongues and fucked his sister.
After Chekhov, he’d head downstairs, putter
with a model plane or pull the lint out
of the dryer screen. Sometimes lie fetal
on the couch, make toast, unbuttered.
How miserable I am, he muttered.

Why Chekhov and not Kafka or Conrad?
Why Talbot and not Daguerre? Lincoln
and not Adams or FDR, John Wilkes Booth
and not Leon Czolgosz or Charles Guiteau?
Why model planes and not carved decoys
in the attic? All the while, he was affable
and focused, building a wooden box camera
and writing an early history of photography.
Grief, like photographs, inerasable.
My God, how miserable.

I’m thinking back on childhood. He sucked
his fingers, not his thumb. He seemed happy
but had trouble sleeping, afraid of the dark.
Aren’t all children afraid of the dark? Only
later came the other things, the unspeakable.
It reminds me of that deer we hit, the knife
my then-husband took to its throat, as men
do, letting one brand of suffering cancel out
another. That deer was a door to years of grief.
And joy gave way to the boredom of everyday life.

Chekhov’s stories are essentially plotless.
Mirsky wrote they are a “biography of a mood,”
and Chekhov himself hoped to write
with the objectivity of a chemist. Bored,
he traveled five thousand miles, three thousand
in a rickety carriage drawn by horse,
to the penal colony on Sakhalin Island. Chekhov,
in ill-health, suffering, trotting his way through
wilderness toward imprisoned sufferers, all to cross
paths with the feeling of irrevocable loss.

—from Rattle #41, Fall 2013
Tribute to Single Parent Poets

__________

Diane Seuss: “My ex-husband walked out on us during a blizzard in 1999, dragging his clothes in two garbage bags down the sidewalk and away. From then on, my son was the child of a single mother. He was also a photographer, a reader of Russian fiction, a heroin addict, and now an addict in recovery. I write about him rarely, and always with trepidation, lest I sentimentalize or simplify what has been, for both of us, an undiminishable journey.” (web)

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May 23, 2023

“Hole” by Bill ChristophersenPosted by

Bill Christophersen

HOLE

I

When the toddler disappeared (the septic tank’s
countersunk manhole cover not quite centered
and so become a revolving door), the May
sun was drying the grass of the bed-and-breakfast’s
manicured front lawn. A gardener
was coaxing a power mower up the property’s
street-side incline, one hand on the throttle,
the other on the driving wheel’s black dish.

When the father disappeared (down the same hole,
self-preservation trumped by something else
more limbic still, some gut-level imperative
or sense that hell had got him by the balls,
no matter how he played it), the mother, alone
and shaking, screamed with her whole body.
The gardener jammed the stick in park and hove
his lumbering, sweating self from the metal seat.

Then the mother disappeared (belayed
by the gardener’s sausage fingers round her ankles,
arms flailing the stinking darkness; flailing
and groping, the acrid stench suffocating
as her terror of the epiphany that life,
into which we bring these ones we love,
can snatch them by the toe and eat them whole;
can leach their little hides, do what we will).

Then the child reappeared (hauled up bodily,
the mother, arms extended like a midwife’s,
seizing it in midair from the father,
who, plunging deep, had gone to work, feeling
past turds till hand touched skull, then tugged
the curled-up infant from the pissy muck
and raised it above his head, a living trophy―
delivered to its mother, then babe and mom delivered

by the puffing gardener, whose yells of “Help! Baby!”
brought a passing mom-and-stroller, hence clean
water, disinfectant wipes, cell phone and the steady
voice required to summon 911).
Below, the father, treading bilious sludge,
barked knuckles on cement, then struck a rung―
egress from that twilight zone of filth;
chimney to pure light, sun-drenched salvation.

And so the father reappeared (climbing
out of deeper shit than I or anyone
I know has ever been encompassed by).
One doesn’t think, they say, at times like this;
one reacts. One thinks all sorts of things: How deep?
Well? Cesspool? Caustic chemicals? Will I
land on him? Break his back? My back? Is he
dead already? Am I committing suicide?

The ambulance arrived in a minute-thirty.
Son and father had stomachs pumped, got meds,
caught colds, got better. All three wake up screaming
more often than most of us. The parents shower
way more than they need to. The two-year-old
climbs the walls at the mention of bath time but
otherwise is doing fine. Turns out babies
hold their breath instinctively under water.

 

II

One wants the tale to end there, and perhaps
it does, a centerpiece of family lore, a
miracle of love, bravery, a special
dispensation all three share going forward.
But perhaps the enormity of the episode,
like a dark star, warps the space around it,
and the debt of love incurred toward the father
smothers the wife, and later the child, in guilt.

Perhaps the father, a dozen or more years later,
watching his teenage son do reckless things,
thinks, “What right’s he got to pull this kind
of shit on me?” Or, seething at the wife’s
obiter dicta and bickering retorts,
thinks, “Why was it up to me to take the plunge?
Was my life more expendable than yours?”
Perhaps the boy, unable at last to abide

the horror of that day, its happy ending
notwithstanding, loses the knack for trust,
without which nothing much is ever ventured,
fought for, wrestled with, maintained in spite
of obstacles? Perhaps no foothold ever
fully persuades; no morning sun on green
lawn but signifies some nightmare’s mise-
en-scène; no darkness seems negotiable.

 

III

A miracle is deceptive. Isolated,
it can make all history seem foreordained,
as if the jeweled part stands for the whole
bloody mess, that far less scintillating
prospect. There’s the chance, of course, that life’s
a latticework, a series of intersecting
miracles or miracle plays whose characters
appear/disappear within the larger structure,

a glimpse of which we’re occasionally afforded:
no clockwork universe but one ably directed
by the playwright himself, who, understandably
perhaps, bends over backward to retain
his privacy, anonymity, invisibility,
though peering, now and then, from a wing to nod
or appearing, like Alfred Hitchcock, in a cameo―
as grandfather, gardener, deus ex machina.

A tempting proposition, this invisible
script, this hidden teleology
in which each of us plays an unwitting part.
But over and against it is the hole―
unspeakable; mephitic; defiling;
predatory, one almost wants to say;
lying there beneath resplendent grass
on which young couples and their babies play.

—from Rattle #40, Summer 2013

__________

Bill Christophersen: “‘Crossing the Bar’ and ‘Ozymandias’ floored me in ninth grade, and hearing Bill Zavatsky and Gregory Orr read when I was in college helped me realize poems weren’t made by gray-bearded deities. When I turned 23, the country band I was playing in dissolved, the girl I was seeing walked, and I was alone in eastern Long Island with winter coming on. It was write or start drinking, and I’m not a drinking man.”

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February 15, 2024

Rattle is proud to announce the winner of the 2023 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers’ Choice Award:

Dusty Bryndal
Brooklyn, New York
for
“No Evidence”

 
The 2023 Readers’ Choice Award was selected from among the Rattle Poetry Prize finalists by subscriber vote. Only those with active subscriptions including issue #82 were eligible. In another close race between the top four poems, “No Evidence” earned 18.8% of the votes and the $5,000 award.

Here is what some of those readers had to say about the winner:

The repetition used throughout by the speaker saying she never wrote about these heavy emotions, thoughts, or life altering experiences before really places so much more meaning into this poem. The speaker has been bottling this up for so long and we are allowed into her mind, if only for a while, yet I am left feeling like I know her personally and now carry the weight of her loss. This poem didn’t feel like the speaker getting diagnosed with cancer was the center of the poem. The takeaway for me was that life goes on even after losing someone you can’t imagine living without and how awful it can be to be the one that gets to live.
—Cassandra Manzolillo

The struggle is so evident in this poem, the way she braids the two huge struggles in her life together and apart, her use of lineation, stanza breaks, and white space to shape her experiences in this poem. The final couplet summing it all up!
—Dell Lemmon

Her poem was beautiful. It was a brilliant look into the dual experiences of grief and having cancer. Everyone’s worst nightmares—losing a child and having cancer—happened to her all at once, and we can really feel the pain.
—Tatiana Raudales

The journey of the poem is poignant. You understand the double loss this woman underwent and the strength she showed in the face of adversity. The emotions are felt clearly by the reader and the story of the poet is heartfelt. As a survivor of a life-threatening illness, I found the poem to be deeply relatable.
—Wendy Van Camp

Dusty’s poem resonated with me. I recently moved back to my home province to help my elderly newly-widowed mother. She suffered a cardiac event a few months ago and it has been a revolving door of doctors, nurse practitioners, pharmacists, lab tests, ecgs, pet scans, and angiograms. What struck me most about this poem is how Dusty sprinkles it with descriptions about the agony of waiting, waiting, and waiting some more for results, consultations, appointments, and the inevitable massive event that may make all the waiting moot. How she persisted with treatment in the face of the worst experience a parent can endure, made my heart ache but also made me dig my heels in with her to carry on—like the way I used to press on the non-existent brake pedal on the passenger side of the car while teaching my son to drive. I will think of this poem during the next 7 weeks of appointments with my Mom.
—Angelle McDougall

Yesterday, I had my annual mammogram. Within an hour of returning home, I received an email with the results: no cancer detected. Also, I have a son. His life is upside down and his heart has been broken by his wife going off the rails after 20 years and three beautiful children, but he is alive. For that I am so thankful. I do not think Dusty’s heart will be much mended by her poem winning, but I cannot not vote for her poem. She writes masterfully, puts her reader right there beside her heart. And winning may give her a nanosecond of joy. Her grieving heart deserves that and so much more.
—Maggie Westvold

Because her kid is fucking dead,
And it hurt like it was mine.
—Breonne Stiglitz

Read “No Evidence” online right now. To read all of the finalist poems, pick up a copy of Rattle #82, or read them one at a time this month as daily poems at Rattle.com.

Dusty Bryndal was the winner, but this year’s voters as divided as ever, and all of the finalists had their own enthusiastic supporters. Every year, it’s an interesting and informative experience reading the commentary. To provide a sense of that, here is a small sample of what our subscribers said about the other finalists:
 

On River Adams’ “A Lesson in Meetaphor”:

I don’t have much patience with writing about writing or poetry about poetry. This poem is an exception. That might be because all language is metaphor, standing in for the thing itself, so this exploration is more foundational. While exploring what does and doesn’t work as a metaphor, it bent my mind a little, then, then quietly left the room, taking my breath with it.
—Karen Berry

A poet who understands that form and syntax strengthen poetry. River Adams’ use of couplets and alternating short and long sentences adds nuance and energy not only to her strong opening metaphor, but to the whole idea of the impact metaphorical imagery has on so many subjects. Her form compliments and impacts the very imagery she so successfully evokes.
—Yvonne Logan

 

On Lisa Bass’s “Makeup”:

Such a tender, detailed poem I love the way it builds and builds. I have a granddaughter who went through that phase; now the focus is on piercings and nail gels. Poem really conveys both the insecurity of the girl, the shock of the shock of the mom and sister.
—Linda Lancione

I loved how tension-filled the poem is throughout, and your immediate connection not only to the mother, but the daughter as well. I love that we don’t need to know why the daughter has been in her room. The imagery of a young woman hiding behind makeup and the comparison to a space suit needed for survival is stunning. I found myself returning to it several times.
—Tammy Greenwood

 

On Roberta Beary’s “Sonnet #1: My Way”:

Any poem that rhymes “steamy hot” and “Charlotte” does it for me!
—Jim Feeney

There is so much going on in this poem! The tension of living with a troubled teen and the sense of being afraid to “jinx it” is captured perfectly. The long lines and absence of end punctuation—until the literal end of the poem—support the tone of tension and caution. Then, to use the symbolism of the makeup and dare to add the astronaut metaphor is just plain powerful. Bravo.
—Nancy Nott

 

On Isabella DeSendi’s “Elegy for Tío Lazaro”:

She turned a man’s whole life into a piece of art—and she impactfully highlighted the larger story of the inequity and injustice toward immigrants in this system who have struggled their whole lives to keep up. I especially love the way she writes about how he could fix broken things (it’s why god gave us hands) and her beautiful use of our constellations of deaths. Finally, it’s the kind of poem that offers up more gifts every time we read it.
—Valentina Gnup

As always, I can find reasons to choose each of the poems, but after several re-readings, I’m voting for “Elegy for Tio Lazaro.” I think it’s a wonderful example of making the personal universal; most of us have suffered (even if not so drastically) at the cold hands of bureaucracy, and the comment offered here on the shameful indifference to the undocumented is all the more powerful for not being polemical. The portrait of the uncle is tender without sentimentality and angry without self-pity. I also admire the clarity of the language and power of the images—”the animal of his thin, brown body lassoed // to an oxygen tank” and “The tip of the letter, still sticking out // of my mom’s black purse like a cigarette / already flickering gone.” The last one is especially good, returning readers as it does to the cigarettes smoked on the sly at the beginning.
—Lynne Knight

 

On Diana Goetsch’s “Motel Surrender”:

It’s the one that’s stayed freshest in my mind this winter, that juxtaposition between the coldest season and the inevitability of burning.
—Thomas Mixon

I love the music of that poem so much—the rhyme and alliteration, the humor and the Shakespearean finality of the final line.
—Katy Stanton

 

On Meredith Mason’s “Use Your Words”:

I finally settled on “Use Your Words,” precisely because of the sensitivity and restraint with which the poet and mother chose the casual but powerful words spoken by her son, herself, and any parent and child facing unwanted separation. Congratulations to Meredith Mason on this subtle moment so finely, gracefully caught in unassuming language!
—Rhina P. Espaillat

This was a tough call as I loved all these poems—however, this one cut me to the core. As a divorced mom of two, I feel the “long-gone” in this poem acutely. The sonnet form is a perfect reflection of the speaker’s attempt to rationalize and order her and her son’s emotions/situation while lending a sing-song quality to the poem. The slight breakdown of structure and punctuation that occurs in stanza 3 builds to the volta—the maple’s hands are empty, just like the mother’s. The closing couplet is the speaker’s last attempt to reconcile her feelings while acknowledging that this is a distance that she will never fully escape or overcome. I want to weep when I read this, but I feel less alone as a result of this meditation. Bravo!
—Sara Smith

 

On Amy Miller’s “Umbrella”:

It says more in fewer words, creates a vivid metaphor, uses dialog, risks sentimentality by employing a sleeping baby and proves that an honest use of language can turn the most mundane, borderline cliche moment into something bigger than itself.
—Rasma Haidri

My vote for the 2024 Readers’ Choice Award goes to Amy Miller’s deceptively simple “Umbrella.” There is a lot of trauma and injustice going on in the world right now and profound poems written about them, but I found that this poem gifted me a much-needed rest. It is almost as if the poem itself served as an umbrella for the readers, shielding them “raindrops exploding.” The poems that get published today seldom focus on beauty and innocence, preference going to the poems that shout or emote. I like the quietness of this poem, the whispered observation of such mundane things as the “little double Oks” of a child’s hands. The poem causes me to pause and reflect. Even when I walk away from this poem, I think about it because the imagery and language are simple but beautifully told.
—Andre Le Mont Wilson

 

On Jacob K. Robinson’s “The Pool”:

I am not a boy, I am not from Texas, and I don’t like to swim, but this poem reaches me in an emotional place of aching and haunting familiarity. I chose this poem from the place where it lingered and stirred up waves of feelings, the place where the best poems land in me when they fall from out of the blue. Like this one. Thank you.
—Michelle Ballou

There is an individual voice present: the poem sounds like no other; and the feel for reality is different from any other poem I’ve read. The imagery is fresh and striking. The line lengths and line breaks support the poem’s meaning beautifully. I like the way the poem becomes far-reaching in its implications during the second half, and that speaks to the attention to structure Robinson shows. The way the poem’s ending words echo the beginning demonstrates impressive organization. Also, the ending of the poem is moving, in an understated way, in keeping with the poem’s voice. It also highlights the work’s psychological and philosophical depth.
—Austin Alexis

 

On Tim Seibles’ “Ants”:

Seibles has written the best ant poem since Robert Frost’s “Departmental,” and like Frost’s wry exploration of human mortality through the lens of the family Formidicae, Seibles’s poem explores the intricate colonies of bittersweet desire that constitute our life-journeys. I love this poem, and how it keeps on walking through me, long after I’ve put it down.
—Dante Di Stefano

The poem starts with something small, an ant, and takes us on a big journey although it’s only a walk down a street in the speaker’s memory, a street that’s no longer familiar, and nothing is familiar anymore, “even my own country.” Like the ant, what can we do but keep walking. That is deep and true in these difficult times. I love the simile, “the city like a black leather jacket.” I love the ant on the dashboard and then the ant returns later on in the poem, this time on the basketball court where the speaker wishes he could believe “what that ant believed with those fancy sneaks flashing all around.” The language is clear and magical. All the turns in the poem bring a surprise. The voice is real. I want to follow wherever it takes me. It took me to a real place of feeling, and that feeling is universal.
—Susan Browne

September 1, 2022

“Kalifornia” by Andre D. UnderwoodPosted by

Andre D. Underwood

KALIFORNIA

She told me that she loved me.
I was only 8 years old.
She spoke of getting married
After we were grown.
We were both living at the shelter.
The year was 2000.
She was 14—
Damn near a grown woman.
 
She told me I was kind.
She said that I was sweet.
She told me those were the things
That she loved most about me.
I was so young;
I was naive. 
Blinded through affection,
I could not see.
 
She only loved the feelings—
Kalifornia never did love me.
 

—from Rattle #76, Summer 2022
Tribute to Prisoner Express

__________

Andre D. Underwood: “I started writing poems back in 2005, because I needed a positive way to express my emotions. So I started channeling how I feel about everything. I channeled the pain, the happiness, the love, the disgust, the fear, and the joy. I wrote about girlfriends, my mom, my brother, my father, my sister, my baby mothers, my enemies, my friends … I even wrote about nature. Poetry is my outlet for my emotions, my freedom of expression—a place where I’m not bound by anything but free to spill my thoughts without consequences.”

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April 20, 2023

“I Asked the Chatbot to Write about a Lighthouse, but It Generated Lies” by Pamela Lucinda MossPosted by

Lighthouse at the Edge of the World by G.G. Silverman, photograph of a lighthouse in fog

Image: “Lighthouse at the Edge of the World” by G.G. Silverman. “I Asked the Chatbot to Write about a Lighthouse, but It Generated Lies” was written by Pamela Lucinda Moss for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, March 2023, and selected as the Artist’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)

__________

Pamela Lucinda Moss

I ASKED THE CHATBOT TO WRITE ABOUT A LIGHTHOUSE, BUT IT GENERATED LIES

You need to be human to know about lighthouses.
 
You need to know what it feels like to wait in the dark for your teenager to come home, with your weighted blanket and your dachshund stretched long against your side, your brain spinning with worry, flashing beams of fear into the blackness of your bedroom.
 
You need to feel old. You need to mis-hear things, mis-state things. Mess up the arithmetic when you add a tip to your check at the 65th Street Diner. Write a note to your kid that says: You rip what you sew. Write in your journal: I am in the throws of motherhood.
 
You need to feel fear and rigidity as you stand on your metaphorical windy promontory, poised at the point where land and sea and the rest of your life meet, but maybe not so much fear that you write reviews like: This book is too pointy. When my toddler fell on this book, he scraped his cheek. I give it one star.
 
You need to know about being alone, about reaching into a popcorn bag in a second-run movie theater and never touching other fingers. When the movie ends, you walk through the doors into the audacity of so much sky, so much light. A flyer on a telephone pole reads: Do you miss singing? You take a picture of it, and the possibility of joining a choir recedes into the vastness of your camera roll, along with pictures of stray cats, of recipes you’ve never cooked, of your bare toes on sand on the first day of spring when there was light on the water and so much joy, spinning and shining from the tall, round room of your heart.
 

—from Ekphrastic Challenge
March 2023, Artist’s Choice

__________

Comment from the artist, G.G. Silverman: “The humor in the title grabbed my attention (I laughed out loud—well done!), then the poem took me on a gut-felt emotional journey, where the reader lives the mother’s anguish for her child’s well-being via wonderfully immersive, scenic lighthouse metaphors. I love how the imagery in the poem takes on a sensuous, dreamy blur toward the end, and we, as readers, become the lighthouse itself.”

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June 18, 2023

“After the Death of Cormac McCarthy …” by Dante Di StefanoPosted by

Dante Di Stefano

AFTER THE DEATH OF CORMAC MCCARTHY, I LOOK AT THE LOCUST TREE OUT MY CLASSROOM WINDOW AND TRY TO EXPLAIN THE VIOLENCE AT THE HEART OF THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE TO MY CHILDREN IN THE MANNER OF AN ERIC CARLE BOOK

Over there, there is a green thing in the way,
under the silver of the moon that isn’t shining
 
because it is the daytime, and on its many arms,
there are so many thorns you could call it a coat,
 
a thorn coat, and there is always someone climbing
its trunk and hurting their hands so much so.
 
A little boy is climbing and a little girl is climbing
and with them the ghosts of their dead grandparents
 
and their unborn children’s children and a caterpillar
who only knows how to eat and eat, thorn and leaf,
 
on the way to becoming a butterfly and a brown bear
and a goldfish out of water flopping upward
 
and a wolf pup and a lion cub and an eagle without
a nest and you and me and every mother and father
 
and son and daughter who ever was—we are all
climbing and climbing and climbing until our hands
 
ache and ache and ache and make a cradle of that ache
and hang a lullaby in the air above that cradle
 
and we are all going up and up and up and it is
painful and strange because we are all also falling
 
down and down and down, deeper than the deepest
part of the ocean, which is singing to us in the way
 
a humpback whale does or in the way the waves
sing to the shore and if you listen very closely,
 
you can hear a great great writer whispering
to the waves in us and the trees in us and the thorns
 
and all that climbing and all those cut palms
and bleeding fingers. Listen. He is ending his book.
 
He is ending the great book of his life. He has no
say in this, but he is saying on the last page: fly them.
 

—from Poets Respond
June 18, 2023

__________

Dante Di Stefano: “Cormac McCarthy is one of my favorite novelists. I wrote this thinking about his death this week and the ways in which McCarthy’s books have helped me understand our nation’s romance with brutality. I was also thinking about how I might explain some of this to my small children. I’ve read The Hungry Caterpillar and Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? a thousand times in the past five years. In Carle’s books the world in all its wonder unfolds. I thought it would be interesting to look at McCarthy’s grim fatalistic view of human nature through the lens of Carle’s imagination. The last two words of the poem are the last two words of my favorite McCarthy novel, Suttree.”

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