Of Lamb by Matthea Harvey, Amy Jean Porter
My rating: 4/5 cats
so come with me on a journey through my thought processes regarding this book:
1) (at work, sometime in the past two weeks) “oh shit, matthea harvey has a new book coming out!!” (orders it into the store)
2) “yay, it came in—it is bigger than i thought it would be. (twss) mcsweeney’s sure does know how to make nice-looking books”
3) “this is beautifully drawn, but why are her phrasings so clunky sometimes?? this isn’t like her!! Lamb thought about trousers, but he was a nonconformist?? don’t give me that stoner almost-makes-sense poetry, harvey!! you are better than that!”
4) “i like so much of this, but overall it is too abstract for me to love—it seems to lack focus.”
5) “oh, a ‘note about the process.’ i shall read this.”
6) “ohhhhhh. wait. ohhhhh. let me read this again.”
7) “oh, okay—you win one more star cat.”
so this book is matthea harvey having a little poetry arts-and-crafts fun. so she went to the strand (or some other bookstore on 12th street that has cheap books outside; i am making assumptions) and said “i will buy the first book i see that costs exactly three dollars” and that book was A Portrait of Charles Lamb. so she bought it and got to work with some white-out. charles lamb, of course, had a sister named mary, and and so what ended up emerging from her whiting out was a dissipated love story version of that nursery rhyme with mary and her little lamb. so this accounts for the occasionally strained lines like his anxiety a glittering chandelier rustling in his mind and makes the fortuitously created lines like He would snap at Mary if he did not feel like feeling. more surreal and impressive. so i ended up liking this more after knowing what was what. and reading this with the background-thinking of those other (non-romantically entangled) lambs adds a whole new texture to it.
so a fun experiment, but i would love to read more of her original words. although a series like this would also be fun. i am torn. the artwork is great.
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