All posts tagged: bees

Adrienne Raphel: “Confession”

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I wrote “Confession” in the winter, recently after I had moved from Iowa City to Cambridge, MA. I’d moved from a rambling attic apartment with secret unfinished rooms to a partially furnished attic studio with a shared bathroom down the hall. My writing space was the floor. The convent of San Marco in Florence, Italy contains small, individual cells, like a beehive, that monks would use for devotion. Each cell is bare save for a simple fresco by the early Renaissance master Fra Angelico. My room in Cambridge hardly had a monastic aesthetic; books and clothes were piled in geological strata. Every so often, I would find a bee feebly circling around the lampshade, or a couple of dead bees in the windowsill. “Confession” came to me after receiving a phone call very early in the morning from a friend whom I hadn’t spoken with in months. I don’t know why she chose that morning. She was in a difficult relationship, unhappy, isolated, yet surrounded by a city; I was feeling adrift and lonely, uncertain …

Laura Eve Engel: “Who Will Speak for This Flesh” – Roger Reeves’ King Me

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King Me Roger Reeves Copper Canyon Press, 2013 Few words locate us in a speaker’s experience more immediately than the first three of Roger Reeves’ debut collection: “I, Roger Reeves…” As if taking up the project of consciousness-raising groups of the 1960s that famously asserted the personal is political, King Me derives its power directly from the “I.” Which is not to say that the whole of this book is stuff from the life of Roger Reeves (or even “Roger Reeves”); here, the “I” bounds from Reeves’s speaker to Van Gogh to French neurologist Duchenne to black, lesbian trumpeter Ernestine “Tiny” Davis to Walt Whitman. Unified by a lyric imagination that asserts a strong, singular voice throughout, these poems explore the various ways we stumble towards an understanding of suffering, of sublimity, and of one another across differences of race, history, sexuality, language, and the ultimate body-boundary that keeps each one of us separate. The collection takes care, too, to explore the transgressions that necessarily occur when we bridge those boundaries in the name of …