The Real Enough World speculates about the invention of self and world in the act of writing poems. Like orchestral movements, the poems vary in tonal qualities and speed, moving from sensibility-driven, antic poems through a deeply personal series of narratives to poems of philosophical reflection where landscape and love operate as tropes for each other. Underlying the whole is the poet's sense that the material of life, as well as language, is insoluble and impermanent--humorous, tragic, absurd, joyous. Even when the mood of the book is most surreal, it is grounded in its accounts of the...
The Real Enough World speculates about the invention of self and world in the act of writing poems. Like orchestral movements, the poems vary in tonal...
The call came at 6 A.M. Karen Brennan's twenty-five-year-old daughter, Rachel, had been in a motorcycle accident. She was in a coma. Her CAT scan, the neurosurgeon said, was very, very ugly. Instantly, Karen Brennan's life of comfortable dailiness becomes "passionate necessary-ness." Cautioned that her daughter will not be the "same person," Brennan waits and hopes through weeks of intensive care, months of coma, and Rachel's determined efforts to walk again. The joy of Rachel's first words is followed by the discovery that she has a severe short-term memory deficit. Rachel cannot remember or...
The call came at 6 A.M. Karen Brennan's twenty-five-year-old daughter, Rachel, had been in a motorcycle accident. She was in a coma. Her CAT scan, the...