No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story. No Kings.
But my Pa is getting old, worked up and about to die. Everyday he lies on the raffia-woven lounge in the patio, beckoning on death to come. When the frightened voice of my sister; Ada, begs him to come into the main house he would say; “Death is coming for me, I don’t want to give it a hard time finding me when it comes.”
The old highway stretched relentlessly in both directions from the bend, disappearing into the heat haze–not that it did Howie any good. He hated both the damn highway and the lousy filling station, but he was stuck there, like the monster centipede he’d once run through with the tip of his hunting knife, nailing it to the back porch floorboard, its legs wriggling like hell but going nowhere.
Michiko Kakutani and I have one thing in common. We both think Dana Spiotta is all that as an author. The illustrious critic has called her “wonderfully gifted” in her review of Lightning Field; declared her second novel, Eat the Document “stunning”; and described her as “immensely talented” for Stone Arabia. I am in complete agreement with all those accolades. Since I don’t review for the New York Times, I can be even more personal and say that every one of her novels resonates with the life I have led as an aging free-love hippy with feminist leanings and an artistic bent. Like Dana Spiotta’s characters, I have never achieved any assured success and have suffered from successive identity crises.
1
Richard & Paul
Unbelievable. So he finds this amazing artifact, and then just turns around and sells it the next day?
SHAMAN IN THE LIBRARY
Naked except for a loin cloth,
ritual scars, and streaks of red clay
he attends the staff meeting.
Bowl haircut, back straight, face impassive.
Zillah raises the glass to her lips and tips the gin into her mouth. It hits her tongue with a dry coolness—she has long since become desensitized to the sting—and its arid, herbal vapors tickle the inside of her nose. No tinkle in her glass, no ice cubes to fence out with her lips. As always, she drinks it neat.