Rain runs past the lamppost at nightand lands, apologetic, on my white canvas shoes. Genesis hums in my earphones—a low machine-thrum that vibrates my skulland does nothing for my mood. People pass me by, one after another,on their busy errands to nowhere that matters. She says she still can’t love me.Maybe she’s lying.Maybe life will … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – Don’t Fall in Love, v.2
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Earth Fire Soul – The Masterpieces of Korean Ceramics from the National Museum of Korea
Earth Fire Soul is less a conventional catalogue and more a sustained meditation on making. The book stages Korean ceramics as a living conversation among three inevitable forces — the clay (earth), the kiln (fire), and the human presence that lends works their inward breath (soul). Organized around the masterpieces held by the National Museum … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Earth Fire Soul – The Masterpieces of Korean Ceramics from the National Museum of Korea
Revisionist Poetry – The Cookie in the Icebox, v.3 (a.k.a. My Relationship with a Cookie, v.6)
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
