Open Books: Events
October 17, 2010 03:00 PM
KELLI RUSSELL AGODON
Charming, self-effacing, fearlessly honest about troubled days, the voice in Kelli Russell Agodon's Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room ($16 White Pine) is both touching and endearingly brassy -- "Trust me, it's not bitterness I carry / in my blood, but the pulse and flow / of ordinary, the white picket fence / I like to call my ribcage." She has dedicated her book to "those who write letters to the world," and her own letters -- these poems -- are written as wife, mother, daughter, poet, woman who has struggled in this world and cannot help but embrace it. "But where is my life?," she asks, "I wander through it in new leather boots, / crushing the ladyslippers in my path. // When I come to a bear munching / on blackberries to fatten up for winter, I pause. // We see each other / like two shoppers at the same sale rack, / each rummaging through, trying to find / what we think we need to fill us up."
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