Life keeps hurtling forward, bursting forth. It’s spring in California, the jasmine’s come in and the streaky roses. It’s been raining hard all morning; just now it stopped abruptly. Lyn writes in My Life, “she observed that detail minutely, as if it were botanical. As if words could unite an ardent intellect with the external material world.” This is Lyn, vitally observing, drawing it all into relation, the mind and the world, botanical, passionate. Making words hold life, making words as life. “Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality,” she writes.
Queer Coolitude hauntings in motion
Shivanee Ramlochan speaks of ghosts
Shivanee Ramlochan, author of Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting (Peepal Tree Press, 2017) writes a Coolitude poetics and achieves a dazzling sense of historical hauntings in her debut collection of poetry. The ghosts leap. Her collection quite literally includes duennes and jumbies as a way to write about the missing, the dispossession, and the longing for a wholeness that haunts her speakers.