Brenda Shaugnessy’s powerful third volume of poems, Our Andromeda, has been considered as a collection many places. Shaugnessy says the book “has to deal with the notion of alternative realities, alternate selves, doubles, twins, sisters…. What if this didn’t happen?”
It is March, and I cannot remember this winter’s first snow, though I am sure I entered its white hive. By now it has been replaced. Weather comes and goes; we enter and exit. Today I have been “out” of weather (indoors), “in” weather (outdoors), back “out” of weather, and so on.
In her poem “Giant Fiberglass Cow,” Mary Quade addresses a roadside statue I might have seen while traveling.
A look at a still life painting and a haiku at the beginning of another year.
Indoors, examining lamps and peering through windows, I recall the James Turrell exhibition I saw last summer at the Guggenheim. I am starting to feel like I am crawling through a pinhole, so I am happy to remember my way out of the house.
Reading Mourning Diary, I had the strange experience of feeling transported, through Barthes’s language, back across contours of my own mourning.
