I hold the chocolate-chip as if a coin from some dead altar, its crust a thin, papery epidermis scored with fossil chips. They glitter like teeth, embers trapped in crystallized sugar; beneath that shell a warm cavity yawns, brown sugar and molasses conspiring there in clandestine whisper, a soft counsel of heat. I might rend … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – The Cookie in the Icebox, v.3 (a.k.a. My Relationship with a Cookie, v.6)
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Night of the Tiki: The Art of Shag, Schmaltz, and Selected Primitive Oceanic Carvings by Douglas A. Nason, Doug Harvey, Jeff Fox
Night of the Tiki arrives as a small, smartly produced argument in the idiom of the coffee-table book: it stakes a curatorial claim with images, short essays, and selection rather than a long, linear history. What it proposes—clearly, and with a kind of tasteful provocation—is that postwar American “Tiki” is neither mere kitsch nor purely … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Night of the Tiki: The Art of Shag, Schmaltz, and Selected Primitive Oceanic Carvings by Douglas A. Nason, Doug Harvey, Jeff Fox
Revisionist Poetry – The Cookie in the Icebox, v.2 (a.k.a. My Relationship with a Cookie, v.5)
I hold the cookie like a coin pried from a grave. Its skin is paper; chips sit like fossil teeth. They glint — dull embers in brittle sugar. Beneath: a warm hollow where molasses whispers. One bite would split it open, spill its secret. Violence buries; devouring is a small grave. I nibble instead, ceremonial, … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – The Cookie in the Icebox, v.2 (a.k.a. My Relationship with a Cookie, v.5)
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Dark by Robert Munsch
The Dark (a picture book that sits squarely in his larger catalogue of anxious, exuberant, and oddly consoling childhood tales) is less a cautionary tale than a quiet excavation of a single, universal fear: the impossible-to-see thing that nonetheless feels very present. Munsch’s gifts — an ear for spoken cadence, a knack for compressing a … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Dark by Robert Munsch
Revisionist Poetry – My Relationship with a Cookie, v.4 – Retitled -> The Cookie in the Icebox
Note: I've gone in a darker directions and found some different takes... more to follow after... I hold the chocolate-chip cookie like a coin from a grave —its crust a dry, papery skin, scored with tiny fossil chips.They glitter as if with teeth, dull embers caught in brittle sugar.Beneath that shell I imagine a warm, … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – My Relationship with a Cookie, v.4 – Retitled -> The Cookie in the Icebox
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Love You Forever by Robert Munsch
At first glance Robert Munsch’s Love You Forever presents itself as the kind of picture book that trades in the obvious—short sentences, a repeating refrain, and a domestic tableau meant to reassure a child at bedtime. Read more closely, however, the book’s spare language and circular structure sustain a far more complicated emotional logic: a … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Love You Forever by Robert Munsch
Revisionist Poetry – My Relationship with a Cookie, v.3
I study this chocolate-chip thing on the plate, its surface a brittle grammar with chips of gold. You can see only a few bright truths at first — crumb constellations clinging to the shell. What the inside must hold: slow heat, brown sugar hymns, a small dark architecture of salt and memory. If I tear … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – My Relationship with a Cookie, v.3
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Mortimer by Robert Munsch
Mortimer reads at first like a comic domestic sketch: it’s bedtime, Mortimer refuses, Mortimer makes a racket, and every adult who enters the scene fails to quiet him. But beneath that simple spine of plot sits the set of a small stage where Munsch — working in his characteristic oral-storytelling register — orchestrates an escalating … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Mortimer by Robert Munsch
Revisionist Poetry – My Relationship with a Cookie, v.2
Study the chocolate-chip cookie — a thin, hard planet of sugar. On its skin, chips glint like constellations; beneath, a warmer gravity. I could bite deep and erase the softened center, or nibble forever and never hear the single true note it keeps for itself. So I wrap a corner in foil, ladle fragments into … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – My Relationship with a Cookie, v.2
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Mud Puddle by Robert Munsch
Robert Munsch’s Mud Puddle reads like a tiny masterpiece of oral storytelling compressed into thirty-two pages: brisk, comic, cumulative, and animated by a single, delightfully absurd conceit — a mud puddle that repeatedly “jumps on” a child and gets her “completely all over muddy.” The story began as a tale told in a nursery school … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Mud Puddle by Robert Munsch
The New Renaissance Mindset 