Ann Patchett, Anne Lamott, and Alice Munro

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State of Wonder, a novel by Ann Patchett (Harper, 2011). A surprising, often beautiful book.
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Imperfect Birds, a novel by Anne Lamott (Riverhead Books, 2010).
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Too Much Happiness, a collection of short stories by Alice Munro (first international edition by Vintage Books, 2010; originally published in Canada by Toronto's McClelland & Stewart and then in New York by Alfred A. Knopf, 2009).

From Alice Munro's story "Deep-Holes": Sally stumbled along faster than was easy for her, with the diaper bag and the baby Savanna. She couldn't slow down till she had her sons in sight, saw them trotting along taking sidelong looks into the black chambers, still making exaggerated but discreet noises of horror. She was nearly crying with exhaustion and alarm and some familiar sort of seeping rage.

I'd read several of these stories before--they were all from either The New Yorker or Harper's--but most were new to me. "Too Much Happiness," for example, which closes the collection, is about Sophia Kovalevsky, a nineteenth-century mathematician and novelist.

Parenting anthology

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Last year, one of my poems appeared in an anthology called Mamas and Papas: On the Sublime and Heartbreaking Art of Parenting, edited by Alys Masek and Kelly Mayhew (City Works Press, 2010).

Here are a few other pieces from the collection:

Often I dream I have forgotten
you somewhere.
Like a parcel, I leave you
in the backseat of the car . . .

An excerpt from "Long Night," a poem by Sharon Dornberg-Lee, pp. 205-206.

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Lump

Of coal. In your stocking. Solid mass in the toe. Or in your throat if you're a coal miner right before the rush of rock like rain . . .

"Lump," a prose poem by Julie L. Moore, is continued p. 222. It was originally published in Alaska Quarterly Review. (Two other poems by Julie L. Moore appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of the Apple Valley Review.)

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I knew something was wrong as soon as the baby was placed, warm and sticky, on my chest. Something failed to click. . . .

It was one of those moments that made me wish I'd never seen a movie. Other moments like this include: the moment my father told me he was dying, the moment my father actually died, the moment my mother stopped breathing, let go of my hand and started to turn purple. No soft-focus was there. No voice-over telling me how to feel, no cut away to rain running down a windowpane to give me time to digest the scene I had just witnessed. Just one brutally continuous shot, hard light and worst of all, reality.
. . .
We got home and went straight to bed. Four of us: husband, dog, baby, mother. Everyone fell asleep and I awoke to find my dead mother wearing a blue and pink stripy hat and crying. I pulled the covers up towards my face and stuffed the comforter between us. I did not want to touch her, whoever she was.

An excerpt from "403 Days Later," an essay about post-partum depression by Ella Wilson, pp. 199-204.

Two memoirs, a novel, long and short films, and two poems

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My name is Howard Dully. . . . In 1960, when I was twelve years old, I was given a transorbital, or "ice pick," lobotomy.

My stepmother arranged it. My father agreed to it. Dr. Walter Freeman, the father of the American lobotomy, told me he was going to do some "tests." It took ten minutes and cost two hundred dollars.

. . . I hadn't been a bad kid. I hadn't ever hurt anyone. Or had I? Was there something I had done, and forgotten—something so horrible that I deserved a lobotomy?

From My Lobotomy: A Memoir by Howard Dully and Charles Fleming (Three Rivers Press, 2007).
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Scaredycat, 2006, a 15-minute short film (and official selection at the Sundance Film Festival) which was included on the DVD Fifteenth and Taylor: Dispatches from a small apartment and packaged with the full-length film The Adults in the Room, a thoughtful documentary/drama hybrid by Andy Blubaugh.
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Pauline said, "Once upon a time, there was a woman who had a birthday."

Michael stopped pouring his cereal and looked across the table at her.

"It was January fifth," Pauline said. "The woman was twenty-three."

"Why, that's your birthday, too!" Michael's mother told her. "That's how old you turned, only yesterday!"

"And because this woman happened to be at a low point in her life," Pauline went on, "she was feeling very sensitive about her age."

Michael said, cautiously, "A low point in her life?"

From The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).

I recently reread this one, along with Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and Celestial Navigation.
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"The Lost Strudel" (originally published in The New York Times) and "On Rapture" (originally published in O, The Oprah Magazine) from I Feel Bad About My Neck: and other thoughts on being a woman by Nora Ephron (Vintage Books, 2006).
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"Your Marriage Gets Louder as You Get Older," a poem by Amorak Huey, and "Half-hearted Apology," a poem by Nicole Koroch, from Ramshackle Review, March 2011.

Just when I think I can't like Tina Fey more than I already do...

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...she writes a book. There were a lot of funny and quotable moments, but I've read two good reviews of this book, so I'll just link to them. One review is at The Buffalo News ("Tina Fey delivers the laughs in 'Bossypants'" by Emily Simon), and the other is from the Los Angeles Times ("'Bossypants' by Tina Fey is funny and heartfelt" by Mary McNamara). There are also many other reviews, op-ed pieces, and blog posts about the book with regard to humor, feminism, etc., and two excerpts in The New Yorker. (I've only read the first, re: working moms, and felt it didn't do the book justice. McNamara mentions the excerpts in her review.)

Bossypants by Tina Fey (Reagan Arthur Books/Little, Brown and Company, 2011).

The Spring 2011 issue of the Apple Valley Review

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The Spring 2011 issue of the journal features fiction by Glen Pourciau, Gregory J. Wolos, and Kevin Carey; poetry and prose poetry by Ryan Ragan, Michelle Valois, Nick Ripatrazone, Neil McCarthy, Tamara Grippi, Karen Skolfield, Danielle Hanson, Regina Faunes, Svetlana Cârstean (translated from the Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin and Claudia Serea), Linda Benninghoff, and Tammy Ho Lai-Ming; and artwork by Sarah Walko (photographed by Christopher Keohane).

The Apple Valley Review is a semiannual online literary journal. The current issue, previous issues, subscription information, and complete submission guidelines are available at www.applevalleyreview.com.

Happy poetry month!

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Mention poetry, and people tend to divide into two camps: the ones who have a well-worn copy of The Bell Jar on the bookshelf and an opinion about Billy Collins's place in the literary canon, and the ones who still remember Mrs. So-and-so, the English teacher from hell, and her fixation on Emily Dickinson or her impossible test questions about the meaning of some poem or other.

"A Few Painless Ways to Celebrate National Poetry Month" is continued here.

Lorrie Moore's Birds of America

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What should she say? It must be the most unendurable thing to lose a child. Shouldn't he say something of this? It was his turn to say something.

But he would not. And when they finally reached her classroom, she turned to him in the doorway and, taking a package from her purse, said simply, in a reassuring way, "We always have cookies in class."

Now he beamed at her with such relief that she knew she had for once said the right thing. It filled her with affection for him. Perhaps, she thought, that was where affection began: in an unlikely phrase, in a moment of someone's having unexpectedly but at last said the right thing. We always have cookies in class.

(Excerpted from "Agnes of Iowa," which originally appeared in Elle. This quote is on page 88 of the Vintage paperback.)


From Birds of America, short stories by Lorrie Moore (1998).

What a great collection. I was going to type out more of my favorite segments, but there were just too many. Seriously.