My neighbor Geraldine
runs her sprinkler
like a public fountain.
The kids run through hollering
when all that dead grass
stabs their little plum feet,
Book by PAMELA ERENS
Reviewed by
It’s a brave choice for Pamela Erens to write her third novel about a birth. Shining the spotlight on two women—one in labor, the other her pregnant nurse—during this passage feels almost subversive. Birth is rarely the main event of a book—it’s something that happens to a character or an entry point. But what a gorgeous book this is, dramatically taut, emotionally wrenching, the prose crystalline. It satisfies the reader as an entire universe in the space of a few hours and a rocking story as well. Perhaps that’s the most surprising thing: this novel keeps you turning pages. We don’t tend to think of labor as driving, propulsive, and yet the story reads more like a thriller than anything I’ve recently read.
It’s also a deeply feminine book. Where many novels are concerned with a Hero’s Journey, complete with tasks and dragons and epiphanies, Eleven Hours is a poster child for The Heroine’s Journey. The birth in a hospital provides the time and place but, beyond that, there is web-like interconnectivity between Lore, who is having her child, and Franckline, the Haitian maternity nurse assigned to her. Though these women are so different, socio-economically and culturally, they share their experience of men and pain and transition. Their relationship accrues in a very female way as time goes on and Franckline helps Lore navigate the peaks and swoops and plateaus of her labor.
Please join us in greeting new contributors Jane Huffman and Jeff Hipsher.
With SALLY BALL
Your name: Sally Ball
Current city or town: Phoenix
How long have you lived here: One year in Phoenix proper, but in the Valley since 1999
The Metropolitan Museum’s Roof Garden installation is an annual staged clash between the ephemeral and the permanent: a contemporary work that sits from April to November atop the Met’s neoclassical building, a Repository of Civilization, surrounded by the ever-mutating-yet-perennial New York City skyline.
This year’s installation, “Transitional Object (PsychoBarn)” by British artist Cornelia Parker, is a house—weathered, barn-red, clapboard, white trim, Second-Empire style with mansard roof, ironwork, and spindle-trimmed porch. Actually, not quite a house, a façade supported by scaffolding and using water tanks as ballast, though it looks quite real and solid. The red siding, corrugated tin roofing, and white trim were salvaged from a collapsed barn in Scoharie, N.Y. The specs call for the structure to stand up to a 100-mile-an-hour wind. On press preview day last month, it made its debut to blue sky and an acid-green display of new leaves and grass in Central Park.
MARNI BERGER interviews RICHARD MICHELSON
Richard Michelson is a poet and children’s book author who has written sixteen children’s books and three books of poetry—More Money than God, Battles & Lullabies, and Tap Dancing for Relatives—as well as two fine press collaborations with the artist Leonard Baskin. Michelson’s poetry has been published in many anthologies, including The Norton Introduction to Poetry, and has appeared in The Harvard Review, The Massachusetts Review, Parnassus, and Issue No. 09 of The Common. He has served two terms as Poet Laureate of Northampton Massachusetts and in 2009 he received both a Sydney Taylor Gold and Silver Medal from the Association of Jewish Librarians, becoming the only author so honored in AJL’s 47-year history. Most recently, Michelson was awarded the 2016 Poetry Fellowship by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
The trampoline park is a long windowless building of springy room-sized black boxes, filled with the dusty chemical smell of partially sanitized grime. Fluorescent light scatters down on us from the rafters, and toddlers shimmy along to Van Halen’s “Jump.” There is a pit of foam blocks, a row of basketball hoops low enough for children to make trampoline-assisted slam dunks, and a dodge ball court that I have rented with university funds for the amusement of my eighteen and nineteen-year old college students. We have been told by the trampoline park’s welcome email to expect “a WOW! experience” as well as the possibility of death, a known risk for which we cannot sue.
Translated by ALICE GUTHRIE
We awoke one morning to news of a death. The person we had lost was the one we used to call the Village Idiot—that buffoon who used to make us laugh and cry at the same time, that leaping, dancing ball of energy who would hurl himself around, wild with enthusiasm, stomping on our toes and crashing into us as he went gesticulating by.
This month we welcome new contributors Sria Chatterjee, Marc Vincenz, and Laurie Rosenblatt, and we’re happy to publish new work by Ned Balbo once more.
By KIRK MICHAEL
This is the second part of a two-part Dispatch. The first part is available here.
I navigate by haphazard emotion, glancing over the wonderful cards that describe the provenance of the art, the investments of the rich across centuries. Willem Claesz Heda’s “Still Life with Oysters, a Silver Tazza, and Glassware” has what the title says it has and also a stamped checkerboard knife fitted for Old Dutch clutches, Schermerhorns buying up property on the docks of New York, New Amsterdam, monochrome banquet pieces slapped onto walls like flatscreens, overturned chalices and cutlery, tarnish and husk, the bitter translucent lemon dripping gold leaf citrus, succulent on the table, the pip as acidic as the pupils in my eyes.
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