Susan Parr, “Untitled”

No skill to sorting rice.
The ways are multiform—
even the urge to decide on one pulls the grain.

So here’s advice:
pour wherever the scoop leads your arm,
pronouncing the name of some

one-syllable thing, like “sky,”
making a tiny screen
for the free-falling.

Pacific Shooter, the debut collection from Susan Parr, was the 2009 winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Series prize. Poems from this collection include “Formal Manners” and “This Is Not a Lemon” (published in DIAGRAM), “Even Football” (reprinted in The Stranger) and “Poem in the Shape of a Poem” and “Brandoid Roundteen” (discussed at Incendiary Lit).

7 April 2011 | poetry |

Read This: Romance at the Nebulas

Late last month, I mentioned that I’d begun writing for Heroes and Heartbrearkers, a new site for romance fans from the same folks who brought you Tor.com. My first review for them was a look at M.K. Hobson’s The Native Star, one of this year’s nominees for the Best Novel Nebula—I’m continuing to read my way through the shortlist, and have posted two new reviews to the site, looking at the romance elements in N.K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and Mary Robinette Kowal’s Shades of Milk and Honey.

One of the reasons I’m interested in this year’s Nebula novel shortlist is that these three novels all incorporate romance elements to varying degrees into their fantasy narratives: In fact, what Hobson and Kowal have written are straight-up romances with fantasy elements; Jemisin’s novel borrows some plot dynamics from the erotic suspense genre, but the really fascinating thing about her novel is that it’s also structured very much like the family melodramas of classic private-eye novels (think MacDonald and Chandler rather than Spillane). I’m reading my way through some of the other nominees to see if they’re also working any romance angles, and I’ve got ideas for more Heroes and Heartbreakers articles down the line…

6 April 2011 | read this |