Light Boxes by Shane Jones
My rating: 3/5 cats
if you are a fan of the surreal and you like poetry, this book will probably please you more than it pleased me.
almost everyone who has rated it on here has given it four or five stars, and i have to kind of assume they are right, and that my not liking this is some sort of personal anomaly, like how i hate the big lebowski but love every other coen brothers film ever. clearly, something is awry.
and it can’t just be that i resent characters who resent perpetual winter, and try to kill the personification of february, who is also kidnapping their children. because i would love constant february; constant biting wind and snowdrifts, that would be just fine as far as i am concerned. and after the field trip that invaded the store today, i think we could do with fewer children…
here is a page, taken out of context, but it gives you a sense of the tone of the book:
February has destroyed dozens of our limbs. Infected men stay in bed where they are sad and useless. The rest of us stay up at night sketching plans for a new war strategy. We take turns pacing, crumpling paper, disregarding each idea that springs from our cold mouths. Selah makes tea with two crossed mint leaves floating on the top of each cup. Without an idea, we question if we should even continue our daily assault of warm-weather tactics. A few of the men have dressed for the day in long pants and sweaters. They throw up their hands and walk out the door. Selah is standing in the doorway trying to make out the mountains behind the clouds. She drops her teacup. Then she says I should come look. I walk over, and she points to her feet and raises her finger up to the roofs of the town. The hot tea has burned a path through the snow from our front door and down into the town.
and there is something lyrical and delicate and lovely that part of me can identify, intellectually, as such, but the emotional rest of me is left cold (no pun intended). i am not terribly well versed (pun intended) in poetry, but the stuff i like is usually less ethereal than this. if you are a poem and you are going to be surreal or convoluted, in order to make me pay attention, you had better be showing me fear in a handful of dust, you know? and this is very poetic prose, which floats and meanders and does tell a story, but in a way that is whimsical and playful-with-fonts, and i think i just prefer my prose more nailed-down.
however, i do like that the book mentions dfw.
but again, i assume the fault is my own, just judging by the overwhelmingly positive responses of everyone else who has read this. there must be some sort of faulty cog in me that needs tightening.
WHO WILL TIGHTEN MY COGS!!!???
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