On The Thin Edge Of November

 On the thin edge of November

smoky air flirts with freezing and the stunned birds

seem to lean forward on the precipice of a warning cry.

Last night I dreamed of you,

my chest a redding leaf poised at a point of immobility.

A wind came up.

Windows grayed.

I rose, denying ghosts.

(Even yours.)

----------

for my BFF's Flash 55 bash.

Book Review : "From The Ashes"

 

From the Ashes by Christie L. Starkweather
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I chanced to find this gal on Facebook and liked what I saw, so I picked up her book. I could really relate to it. It's split into five sections, an almost classical hero's journey from pain and ashes up to self-acceptance and strength.

Christie Starkweather has a roaring strength and passion that I really loved. She doesn't sugar coat her hard times or the despair they engendered, but throughout, there is always a fierce will to survive and rise up.

I liked "Redemption" in which neither angels nor devils can take in all of who she is. This necessary duality is at the heart of the book. "Playing Pretend" is a deceptively simple piece about the seductive emptiness of living inauthentically. I liked "Missing Me" because I've experienced that sensation of having lost myself. "Stolen Pieces" displays her characteristically sharp and unflinchingly honest style. "Into The Flames" is back to duality again, and it gave me a shiver of self-recognition. "Sipping Tea" is a fanciful entry in the more light-hearted middle section. The fourth section was my least favorite, as there were several almost greeting card-ish love poems there, and to me she seemed to lose the thread a little bit, as those drunk on love will do. I did love "100% Authentic" because, as a Detroit girl, the line "I wasn't built on an assembly line" pleased. In the final section I felt that she really found her footing again. It's full of hard-won wisdom and celebration of being there for one's self, there for others, and at peace with who one really is.

This is a strong honest collection and I recommend it.

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Book Review : "The Sun Down Motel"

The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It was okay. It's about Carly, who goes to Fell, New York to try to unravel how her aunt Viv disappeared while working the night shift at the Sun Down Motel 35 years previous. The POV shifts between Viv in 1982 (which I much preferred) and Carly in 2017. Carly annoyed me. I kept picturing her as Denise from Stan Against Evil. Appropriate I guess, since the motel is quite definitely haunted.

That said, this is less a ghost story than it is Nancy Drew Visits The Bates Motel. The first half tried my patience and I couldn't decide if I liked it or not. The spooky motel was cool, but the two dopey girls running around playing teen detective wore thin quickly. I also got very sick of the author's habit of invariably and everlastingly describing everyone's full ensemble every time they appear. Yes, we want to be able to visualize the characters; no, we don't need the full Marie Claire.

In the second half I have to say that I did get drawn in a lot more, as Viv consistently held my interest with her determination and resourcefulness. Carly, OTOH, continued to grate, with her super convenient luck in finding just the right (you have no idea) apartment, and her crush on the straight-from-central-casting handsome rogue Nick, who stays at the Sun Down because it is the only place he is able to fall asleep. (Um, kay.) The creepy motel is certainly the star here, and there were other things to like, including the weird baddie who checks in from time to time, but I just could never shake the tv movie feel of the whole thing. Not really recommended, though it is readable. Kudos for the cover, which is excellent.



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Patos Extraños

We are odd ducks, motherless

full of gunpowder and honey.

We see everything onrushing,

through the prism of a bus windscreen,

drinking to stop the chatter,

always bumming a dollar and then drawing on it,

turning it otherworldly, gorgeous, useless.

Dead brothers rise up from their graves

as we try to have dinner, watch tv.

"They're weird," say the women 

in their housedresses and galoshes,

whose dreams are unyielding as can openers.

A woman is expected to be beautiful,

a man stoic.

Where does that leave us?

Gauguin never came around again after the thing with the ear.

Mothers die, Lorca wants to kiss you,

and Diego fucks everything that's not nailed down.

We live in a snow globe inside a tornado funnel.

We are divine strays

leaving tracks on new sidewalk,

ducking thrown shoes from a holy or profane hand.

Here we are in Vinnie's car,

seeing swirls and jagged edges,

bizarre permutations and fields of flowers

in some cop's mirror shades.

The New Mexico night seems to bless us

as the cop lets us off with a warning,

his common brand of gibberish 

as foreign to us as ours is to him.

_______

for Sunday Muse #131.

Lucky

Luck doesn't just happen.

It bakes. Time is the oven.

Like that? ^^

Fuckinay.

You're lucky to know me. 

You could have been hit by an SUV

and ended up in the hands of a quack hiding from the Anti-Defamation League.

Geez, would you look at the weird shit in jars on his shelf

(If he existed.

If that driver hadn't swerved.) 

Luck is the residue of design

like jam on a knife

at the breakfast table of infinity.

Whoa, nice, right? ^^

You were lucky when you ran out of here

carrying all that shit.

Lucky traffic was light.

Lucky the sun was up.

Lucky you got me to sign my (brilliant, fantastic) book

before you ran out of here like a chicken from the skillet,

jabbering about luck

and some other unkind hoo-ha about the funny papers.

________

for Sunday Muse #130. 

Book Review : "A Wartime Love"

 

A Wartime Love: A World War Two Drama by Shiralyn J. Lee
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I'm stunned, really. I'm stunned by the many plurals spelled with apostrophes (like this: apostrophe's), the blessed FLOOD of tears at every turn, the constant whimpering and trembling (What ever happened to that famous English reserve?) and just the whole host of offenses against Good Writing which are to be found here. What a mess.

The novel takes place in wartime England and that setting was one of only two things I liked about it. The other was the touching sweetness between the two main characters, Stella and Ruth. In their private moments, they really are lovely together. However, except for the love scenes, the writing is so laughably bad, and the editing non-existent (despite a claim that it was edited by some outfit called P-ink), that I had to resort to extreme measures just to get through it without extensive therapy. Arriving exhausted and annoyed on page 98 (of 222), I got out my pen and starting marking every clumsy, misspelled, repetitive, awkward, nonsensical, irritating passage as I went along. This process kept me interested enough to tolerate reading to the end.

The whole thing is stagey and melodramatic. Yes, life during the Blitz was certainly enough to try anyone's endurance, but here the only one being tried is the poor reader. Every time someone's teacup is upset, the characters start trembling and whimpering. Tears and more tears ensue. Even when a person might actually react that way due to bad news or whatever, it was done so often, and in such a predictable, plastic, over the top way, that it almost became funny. Then we have the mother, whose answer to every event is to make more everlasting tea. Moving right along, I am not one to shun the deets, but oh dear me does the author go into endless detail about trivial stuff. Every time a door opens, an inventory team gets its wings. We hear about the lamp shade, the dresser, what's on the dresser, the wallpaper (always flowered), the rug, the spider in the corner, everything. This is especially vexing when it's the middle of an important plot development and Lee pauses to inventory the soup tins or something. Moreover, the segueways are weird and jarring. On the occasions that the bombings or a sweet moment between the women absorbed me, Lee would jump to some wildly different mood and tone. For example, she manages (somehow!) to nail the perfect ending and then ruins it by segueing into a pedantic summary of WWII, followed with a painful and unnecessary "fifty years later" bit in which we discover that two of Stella's sisters live happily ever after with kiddies and the other mourns her life away over her dead serviceman boyfriend who she seems to have only known for two weeks or something before her steady boy yelled ships ahoy and joined the nay-ay-vee. (Or the army). In short, the "update" was really just a depiction of bizarrely static lives. Whee. So, even when Lee gets it right, she then turns around and messes it up.

Revel in this tortured sentence about Christmas decor: "It gave little in the way of joy but at least it was able to offer some sort of normality in the way of celebrating the traditional holiday." Now *I* want to whimper and burst into tears in the way of hammering my head against the desk. I haven't even mentioned the Spitfires leaving to bomb Germany, never mind that Spitfires were not bombers. And I've spared you the handy plot resolution near the end that is as unlikely in tone as it is emotionally false. All I can leave you with is that this is NOT the worst book I've ever read to the end. That "honor" still goes to Linda Rentschler's godawful "Mother", which makes this disaster look like Shakespeare. Need I say...NOT recommended.

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Michigan: A Short Subjective History

Always wear gloves when handling lanterns,

good boots in spring, cowls or hoods in fall.

Mothers kill,

that is what I know.

Fathers carry vinyl primer and epoxy out to the slipway.

I played cards with my father, we lit the diamonds.

Mother was the ace of spades, a concentrated gravity.

Only flame can light a lantern, though fuels vary.

Throw flour on a grease fire,

tarpaulins across fresh graves.

On the water, my father and I, 

we kept our lights above the horizon.

Mother called me by the wrong name

and sent hook-tides to force me back.

There was no electricity,

she had stolen voltage from the fuse box to commit suicide. 

My brothers arranged the funeral, one sad, one stoic.

I danced a sailor's hornpipe,

one arm in the air,

the other on my hip.

Later, I sat on a rock in the rain like a mermaid.

Wear oilskin for weather, tie your hair back for wind.

Cry if you need to while cleaning the oarlocks,

and recite by rote the lakes you know 

by temperature, reputation, and depth.

________

for Sunday Muse #129.