Marge Piercy, “Collectors”

Some people collect grudges
like stamps or rare coins.
They take out their prize holdings
to polish till they glow.

But after a while, it doesn’t work
any longer, so they need fresh
ones to cherish the way another
will groom a champion setter.

Friendships are expendable
as last decade’s palazzo pants.
Rejecting is more fun than
holding close. So on they go

their paths littered with torn
and discarded friendships,
like bones outside the den
of a fairy tale giant.

“Collectors” is one of the previously uncollected poems in The Hunger Moon, a selected retrospective of Marge Piercy‘s poems from 1980 to 2010. Other new Piercy poems in the collection include “The low road,” “The curse of Wonder Woman” (published in Blue Fifth), “Football for dummies,” and “End of days” (published in Rattle).

12 May 2011 | poetry |

Jennifer Egan, Winning

Yesterday, I wrote an item for Shelf Awareness about the launch of the Goodreads Book Club, which will feature Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. I spoke to Egan for the piece, and it includes some reflections on her own involvement with book clubs as both an author and a reader, but I’d also spoken with her about the books she’s been reading lately, including Jessica Hagedorn’s Toxicology, The Uncoupling by Meg Wolitzer, and Emma Donoghue’s Room. “I thought it was spectacular, really, deeply unsettling,” she said of the Donoghue. “I felt one of those seismic shifts inside me reading it, which is rare for me.”

“For a long time before that, I was actually reading nineteenth-century novels,” Egan added. “I reread Anna Karenina, David Copperfield, and Bleak House in the last few months… One thing that I’m really interested in is the way that the nineteenth century has come to be regarded as this bastion of convention—when people mention the conventional novel, they’re often alluding to the nineteenth century—and yet, those books aren’t conventional at all. They were very loose and flexible and they had lots of things that I think would almost be regarded as experimental now. I’m kind of curious about that, and I definitely want to read more, but there’s a lot of recent stuff I want to catch up on, so I’m going to do that first.”

(more…)

11 May 2011 | interviews |