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November arrives, and the countdown to winter (and winter break) begins. Next Wednesday I'll be reading from A Sunny Place with Adequate Water at the Shaker Heights public library, along with Sarah Marcus and Christine Howey. Details are here. It's free and open to the public.
In other news, I was thrilled to discover yesterday that A Sunny Place with Adequate Water is reviewed by Daniel Heffner in the new issue of American Microreviews and Reviews. Here's a tidbit:
Mary Biddinger’s collection, A Sunny Place with Adequate Water, reads like stream of consciousness with a fever: her couplets and tercets spring from image to image with a restless longing. “I” and “you” and “we” run through her poems; the speaker and others wandering through a landscape of abandoned fruit stalls, miniature models, and a remarkable number of coin-operated apparatus.
The speaker struggles to manage and make sense of a variety of relationships. In “A Coin-Operated City of the Past,” the speaker first says “We did not know each other,” then asks “You made / me, didn’t you?” The contradiction is a powerful one, an example of what Biddinger does so well in this book. The book presents a speaker moving through a community, testing connections and values and people, sensing underlying violence, and speaking it all in a beautifully complex, surreal, and vigorous voice.
The speaker struggles to manage and make sense of a variety of relationships. In “A Coin-Operated City of the Past,” the speaker first says “We did not know each other,” then asks “You made / me, didn’t you?” The contradiction is a powerful one, an example of what Biddinger does so well in this book. The book presents a speaker moving through a community, testing connections and values and people, sensing underlying violence, and speaking it all in a beautifully complex, surreal, and vigorous voice.
Thank you, Daniel and AMRI.
I keep reminding myself that I'm going to get to be a writer again soon. How many days?
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