Recommended Reading

This week's recommended reading: two poems & a photography portfolio.
For fans of: dead animals.

Fact: People are drawn to the grotesque. It’s true; don’t pretend like you don’t rubberneck while passing a car wreck on the highway. But hey, it’s okay. Everyone else rubbernecks, too. And they’re not just rubbernecking car accidents, or slowing down to see what kind of bloody and tangled creature lays on the side of the road. They’re pausing and observing, writing poems, taking photographs.

One of the privileges of art is to inhabit that disturbing space and draw from it, transform it into something really lovely. Andrew Bruce, a photographer pursuing his MA from the Royal College of Art, has mastered that transformation. His images are quietly sad and beautiful. Check out his online portfolio here.

Mute Love Poem by David Harris Ebenbach (from Issue #49) is another example:

I don’t know what to say about the skunk

that our neighbor’s dog killed and left

in the street, open-eyed in the wide and

bitter aura of its afterlife, about the city

coming to shovel it off the asphalt but

leaving a lot of the smell behind somehow,

or about the electrical charge of need that

cicadas have been adding to the air all

week, or about the black ants that cross

the bathroom floor on the diagonal,

or what it all has to do with you in a car,

driving the length of Pennsylvania to

come home, come home, all of us right

here, in this place, finally come home.

The poem drops the reader into that macabre region – a decaying skunk – gives visceral description – that lingering scent – and then turns, moving towards something urgent and relevant – a deeply rooted longing.

Joyce Peseroff’s poem Margin of Error (found in the Fall 2011 Issue of Ploughshares) evokes similar emotions. The speaker begins by acknowledging how inconsequential our time on earth is, and concludes:

“Such a tiny fraction, so little between

.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001

and zero, my life

falls within the same statistical margin of error

as a cat struck in the fast lane

glued by its tail to blacktop, thrashing

to separate from skin.”

Peseroff's poem is a reverse image of Ebenbach's, beginning in a universal existential territory and then moving to the gruesome. Both poems succeed in drawing something lovely out of that dark place.

Pick up Ploughshares (subscribe from their website) to read Margin of Error in its entirety, and the rest of Peseroff’s wonderful poems (and please check out Laura van den Berg’s story “I Looked For You, I called Your Name”).