Angela Shaw, “April”

is all lace and boudoir. She reclines, wigless
and half-naked in the haze of her private
rooms, chain smoking, deflowering éclair
with furtive tongue, bemoaning the pinch
of her little miss shoes. She is more freckled
than is suspected, less young, and when the mouth
of her silk robe unfolds, it confesses
her dimpled skin, the lap of rich thigh
on rich thigh. She jiggles her clinky
bottles, sips at her tinctures, weeping
easily over this hidden toilette, burnt
curl, slipped hem, the short, huffy cough
of powder puff. Her muttered curses are coarse
as grosgrain as she totters in corset
and stockings, rehearsing protocol, her self-
mocking curtsy. But she clears like water and later
will deny you saw her or knew her as she
litters with lipstick imprints spring’s cotillion.

The Begining of the Fields is the debut collection of Angela Shaw’s poetry. Several other poems had been published in Poetry: “After Sleep the Wild Morning,” “Crepuscle,” “Miscarriage,” and “The Beginning of the Fields.” Another poem, “Children in a Field,” was featured in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry column, and you can hear Shaw read from others at the PS Voices website, including “Barbed Wire,” “White Picket,” and “Stone Wall.”

Concerning “Children in a Field” and “The Beginning of the Fields” (and another poem, “Wheat”), Shaw told an interviewer: “I wrote the three poems that open my book while I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts but longing for the landscape of my childhood. I turned to the work of Fairfield Porter—his Long Island landscapes—as a source of inspiration for my writing. I was reassured, too, in my reading about Porter, to learn that he had turned down a teaching post in Carbondale, IL, because, as he put it ‘there was nothing to paint.’ I imagine that for other artists there would have been plenty to paint in Carbondale—but not for Porter. Somehow that anecdote gave me permission to forgo using a visual vocabulary that wasn’t comfortably my own at that time.”

10 April 2011 | uncategorized |

Indie Bookselling Love on Twitter’s Homepage

A few days back, my friend Rebecca Joines Schinsky (The Book Lady’s Blog) wrote a post about how the bankruptcy of Borders underscores the fact that “where we buy our books matters, and it’s time we started acting like it.” Inspired by her remarks, I suggested on Twitter that we should all visit a bookstore over the holiday weekend and buy a book—then, on Saturday, I went to two bookstores. I started at one of the Borders locations in Manhattan that will be closing down due to the bankruptcy proceedings (liquidation sale!), and picked up some business books that I’d been meaning to read, plus a few other things, then I swung by Posman Books in Grand Central Terminal, where I found two new releases from NYRB Classics that looked fascinating, then got a tip on what bookseller Stacey Agdern assures me is a great romance novel. I took everything home and started reading.

Last night, I mentioned that I’d gone shopping, and explained why:

So far, more than 200 people have retweeted that sentence—along with I don’t know how many others who abridged it slightly—which gave me an opportunity to encourage people to shop at a bookstore today if they haven’t been out already this weekend, and add to my list of bookstores with Twitter accounts. Sure, I’m a bit giddy at the latest iteration of “Internet famous,” but mostly I’m psyched that something I said resonated with enough people that the message was elevated to a whole new platform. And I’m hoping that a lot of bookstores will see more business in the days to come… not just because of what I said, but because of what many other people just as passionate about books and bookstores as I am are saying.

21 February 2011 | uncategorized |