Correction: It’s a Book Chit Chat

Sharpening Your Saw: Mental with Reading

 

I love reading varied genres. Even when I teach writing or literature, the syllabi are a mixed-genre. From a literary standpoint: storytelling comes in more than one form. Fiction is a made-up story-telling. Non-fiction is based on facts of actual events, slightly blurred. Poetry has a metrical composition and can be fact or fiction but wrought with emotion and imagery among other aesthetic structures. When it comes to writing, storytelling comes in more than one form. Sarah Viren, the author of Mine, puts it this way “genres are crude masks” writers are “made to wear.” Perhaps, that’s why I mix up my reading.

 

Reading other people’s stories can be fun, exciting, sad, and insightful despite the genre. We all read for different reasons. Once upon a time, I read to escape; now I read to learn, to laugh, to sharpen my skills, to get experiences, and to hone my writing craft. I don’t read for escape because I’m a realist. Reading is not going to help me escape my present situation; therefore, I need to learn to deal with reality. I’m not fond of this trait about myself, but I deal with it. This is why I read non-fiction. (I will not include a nonfiction book in this post.) When it comes to fiction, I’m always dissecting the work, where’s the message, what’s the metaphor, how are the characters developing, will there be another book? Can I visit this place? When it comes to poetry, I luxuriate in the images, the rhythm that creates the story. The poet has no choice but to choose the exact word that provokes and disturbs, creates and inspires the story. One thing about poetry, perhaps there is not a story.

 

With all that said, I want to chat about two books I’ve read A Year to Exhale, and The River Will Save Us. The books found me: on Linked In, and on the Writer’s Block FB Page. I think I’ve said this before, I’m not a book reviewer by any means, however, I do have an opinion about what I read. Writers and poets are like friends, you enjoy sitting at the table and listening to their stories and asking questions. And when they leave, you can’t wait for them to return, sometimes with more to say.

A Year to Exhale
By Kia Harris
Xlibris, 2018

 

Tell me more is how I felt when reading Harris’s debut novel, A Year To Exhale. I found myself always waiting for something to happen, how apropos for the title. Four dynamic women, Mia, Winter, Tanya, and Taryn, with remarkable careers, stunning bodies, goddess hair and stylish fashion are waiting to take the next step in their career and their relationships.

 

The foursome has been forever sista-friends who continuously encourage each other despite the distance between them. Harris illustrates the importance of friendship among women who can trust each other to tell them the truth even when they don’t want to hear the truth. The friends have experienced each other’s loss, love, and pain as well as their victories and joys. When Mia makes partner, it’s a moment of celebration, although when Winter opens her second Bed and Breakfast the celebration is glossed over. We also don’t get to mourn with the death of  Tanya’s mother.

 

Death of a loved one is tragic, depressing and dredges memories and mourning. We never feel those sad moments when Tanya receives the news of her mother’s death.  The scene speeds by unlike the scene in Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage, where the husband refuses to leave the cemetery, where he sits in the dirt and we feel his pain as the loss of his wife wrenches his souls.

 

Harris gets it right when it comes to the hardship and the joy of romance. Isn’t every woman and man at one time in their life looking for Mr. or Mrs. Right? Love always comes at a price; the heart is sure to have been shot with an arrow, and in taking out the arrow people suffer, particularly the men in A Year to Exhale. The men in Mia, Winter, Tanya, and Taryn have to wait for walls to crumble before these ladies open their hearts because of past mistakes of former lovers and husbands in their lives.

 

More senses. I tell my students when they write and when they read reach for the sense: can you smell it, taste it, see it, feel it, hear it. A Year to Exhale lacks the senses. I wanted to listen to the voice of the characters. Who sounds nasally like Fran Drescher or comical like Tiffany Haddish. I’m a foodie, I desired to taste the “decadent” food and “exquisite” wine served at Winter’s bed and breakfast. Just how hot is South Carolina heat at Hilton Head. Thus, the character’s inner dialogue reveals how they are feeling at the moment, but I find myself wanting more than background information, but to know what’s going on in the world around these characters.

 

The sage adage advises writers to show don’t tell, and Harris will soon discover her balance in her next book.

 

A Year to Exhale is a quick read; chocked with romance and love. Harris reminds us married women who have careers need tenderness, and a woman wants a man who respects and honors her even when she’s successful, gorgeous and flawed.

 

 

The River Will Save Us
Poems by Linda Simone
Kelsay Books, 2018

 

What is poetry? According to poet Rita Dove, “Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.” What is a poem? “…a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography,” notes Robert Penn Warren. And Poet Linda Simone’s book of poems, The River Will Save Us speaks of beauty, emotion, intelligence, insight, and pleasure all at once. Through stories of travel, family, and dreams the collection illustrates self-understanding.

 

The collection is divided into three parts: Postcards from a Past Life, Teahouse on the Texas Moon, and Speaking with Rivers.

 

Poems in Postcards from a Past Life are notes of a family migrating from the suburban to an urban lifestyle. Each verse gives us a glimpse of New York City and Texas. For a moment we are in “the city that never sleeps”; “Near Madison, Fifth Church/of Christ, Scientist”; in the laundromat where “House rules shout from the wall.” And then we weep with the speaker as she “moves like the river” turning in her New York license for a temporary Texas one. Emotions are surreal as the speaker wants to shout: “Give it back”/ “It’s where I’m from, who I am!” If you have ever migrated from one place to another, one country to another, you understand the angst of the poem “Turning in My License.”

 

In Texas, the speaker laments at Christmas time missing the “East Coast cold” and “family savoring seven fishes.”

In Teahouse on the Texas Moon, Simone dedicates the poems to the Jungu family, Japanese immigrants who left California for San Antonio in early 1900. Migration. Simone illustrates understanding the self when movement is inevitable. This section offers a longing of an “artist father”; learning Origami “patience” is like a “fragile crane,/carry us from Los Angeles to Texas-wide plains.” The taste of tea sweet, matcha, green, and “vintage kimonos” patched in stories.

 

On this journey, Speaking with Rivers are poems of rivers and how they run through our lives from “murderous floodwaters” to “splash and play on floating footbridge” and burying “our dead” “By sky-painted waters.”

 

Form

Simone’s uses one of my favorite poetry forms called the Golden Shovel, which is also the title of a poem in Terrance Hayes’s 2010 National Book Award-winning Lighthead. I love teaching the Golden Shovel; the form forces the writer to borrow to create; it’s a union of the minds of poets, thus something borrowed, something new. Hayes borrows from Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool” and Simone borrows from Williams Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow” to create “Rainwater.”

 

The poet not only takes us through the teahouse, honoring Japanese immigrants but also scatters haikus throughout what looks like a blank page. Be advised to slow down, look down, and to the left.

 

When reading these poems, individually or collectively, family, dreams, and travels are vivid, emotional and nostalgic.

 

Simone illustrates Robert Frost’s words, “To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.”

 

Until next time,

I pray God’s best life for you