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Open Books: Events
October 26, 2010 07:30 PM
MEGAN SNYDER-CAMP
"The road to Oysterville curves left / until it becomes the road out of Oysterville." There's a strong Northwest element to the poems in The Forest of Sure Things (Tupelo $16.95), Megan Snyder-Camp's first book. But in fact the poems exist in a richly imagined place, where a garden holds "agreements we can't hear." Life in a small coastal town is sharply realized -- "yesterday you were glad / to hear of a new bakery in town / finally a place we've never been" -- as is a strong sense of the unknown -- "as a girl I'd type telegrams on the keyboard // of our dark computer to let aliens know I was no threat." Snyder-Camp writes gorgeous metaphors -- "bees flew from the sorrow / and when they died, lighter than air, he strung their bodies into sound.” And through metaphor she conveys that time is the only reality. Of boats constructed in bottles she writes, "these boats break under the weight of the dust of the years it takes to build them."
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