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Open Books: Events
September 25, 2008 07:30 PM
ERIN MALONE
Though made up of just twenty poems, Erin Malone's fierce and poignant
chapbook offers a reading experience of remarkable depth. The winner of the
2007 Concrete Wolf Chapbook Award, What Sound Does It Make ($10) is an exploration of the complexities of motherhood that is at once tender and
harrowing -- "Like a horse he had to / break me // his hand the star /
between // my lowered eyes." The arrival of the child brings with it an
unsettling displacement of the known self -- "Who is it he loves?," wife
says of husband, "I'm not who I was." The speaker in these skillful lyric
poems is loving, angry, frightened, an acute observer who is breathtakingly
honest about life "At the Seams," -- "B/c there's snow on the table and salt
on the streets. / As if I meet the New Year with my shoulders raised & my
hands up." Affection and humor flicker, too, as this child who brings
"fevers, croup, decoupage" brings also a new music -- "This was not a song
I'd known."
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