I want it to be spring. Spring in the north is like fall in the desert: a cause for celebration.
#TBT I remember those first cool days… like I am salivating for the first warm ones, now.
There are only a couple of seats left in my ApiaryLit generative CNF workshop in April. If you’re stuck (believe me, I know how that feels), or looking for new prompts and ideas, or just someone to give honest, pointed, and thoughtful feedback on some new writing, I’d love to work with you!
Carrie Fountain’s Burn Lake
I’m so in love with Carrie Fountain, even though it is very much unrequited. Burn Lake is not a new book, nor is it new to me. But I re-read it last weekend and was just as enamored with it as I was when I first got it a few years ago.
So, the book won the National Poetry Series back in 2009, judged by Natasha Trethewey. It is about New Mexico and New World histories of conquest and apathy, but also about sexuality and mothers and industry and ex-urban spaces and fire.
When she writes, ” “We are all alone,” / they cry. And the sky answers back / by not moving an inch” I get a sense of the cruel sublime that operates against and upon the pent-up teenagers and construction workers and locals waiting in line at the first McDonald’s in Fountain’s Las Cruces. And then there are amazing moments like this:
“Because this is what the dog
was made to do.
Because for some lucky animalsthe space between the body
and what it wants
is all there is.”
I was very fortunate to take a class from Fountain in 2009, at Austin Community College. She was a generous reader of what were surely terrible poems of mine. The course was taught online and we only ever met face-to-face once, in an awkward and disappointing exchange. But I don’t hold that moment against this book. It is intelligent and the poet’s hand here is sure and deft. I highly recommend it.