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Open Books: Events
October 22, 2010 07:30 PM
ELIZABETH J. COLEN & SHANE MCCRAE
The lyrical prose poems in Elizabeth Colen’s Money for Sunsets (Steel Toe Books $12) illuminate the difficult relationships of family, friends, and lovers. "If I knew my mother would slap me for saying she married for money, I would have done it sooner.... If I had known my father I would have said anything...." The tension in these poems is palpable -- "I was the man you picked up, the one who worried us both," and the often present sexuality is usually stark and dangerous -- "If I pulled her hair, it was only to say I love you into her ear." Colen's language is a marvel of compression; as such it supports the urgency of her poems, squeezing out a tough compassion for her roughed-up people.
Shane McCrae's In Canaan (Rescue Press) takes the form of a tightly written dramatic monologue. The voice of the sequence is Margaret Garner's, the escaped slave who, facing capture, murdered one of her children and attempted to murder the others rather than return them to slavery. "I wanted them / to see that death was calm inside." One of her children was fathered by her husband, the others by her "Master" -- "for every child he gave Elizabeth for every / child who bore his name / I bore that white child's shadow." In McCrae's crisp first-person retelling, Margaret's choppy speech, her dream-like distance from her act and her complex emotions, brings her tragic story to life simply and compellingly.
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