Read This: Under My Roof

My favorite paragraphs from all the reading I’ve done this week:

“What are we waiting for? Did you buy a bunch of smoke detectors?” I asked him so he wouldn’t know I knew that he bought commercial grade uranium online.

“No, I bought commercial grade uranium online. Perfectly legal.” About ten miutes later, he signed for the uranium and put the box in the trunk of his car. Then we drove to the FedEx shipping center a few blocks away. There he answered to “Jerry Wallace,” Mom’s maiden name, and quickly flashed her old passport that he had put his picture on and then re-laminated to claim another box. That one went on my lap for the drive home. I wasn’t too happy about that because it was heavy and radioactive. Since the sample was only twenty percent Uranium-235 I didn’t have to be that worried, but, you know, testicles.

Even though I’ve been a Nick Mamatas fan for a while, it took me a while to get around to reading Under My Roof. Luckily, it’s a novella, so it goes by pretty quickly. Basically, all you need to know is that the narrator’s dad has decided to secede from the United States, like Peter Griffin did in that one episode of Family Guy, except that Peter didn’t have a homemade nuclear device, but other than that it’s a more realistic version of the scenario. Slightly. For one thing, the narrator’s a psychic pre-teen. Anyway, it all escalates pretty quickly, but in ways that remain true to the story’s fundamental conventions, and I just think that if you share my sense of humor, you’ll dig it. So there.

7 April 2007 | read this |

Elaine Equi, “The Objects in Japanese Novels”

Empty cages outline
the periphery of a named thing.
Their emptiness shines
like lanterns on virgin snow.
A few flakes swirl up,
caught—as scenic views
are caught in parts of speech,
where wishes and schemes
glow gloomy as a shrine,
and hair is a kind of incense.
Here, even abundance is delicate
with a slender waist.
And sorrow, embarrassment, disgust
can be aestheticized too
if surrounded by the right things—
a refreshing breeze, a small drum.

From Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems. Equi will be reading tonight at Marymount Manhattan College with fellow poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar, in a National Poetry Month event sponsored by the Academy of American Poets.

5 April 2007 | poetry |