Last month I had heard the news about Toni Morrison's passing while I was packing for a weekend away. Earlier this year I'd read and loved SULA, and thought that it was seemed like a good time to read her debut novel, THE BLUEST EYE. I read it in the span of an improbably quiet but beautiful day in upstate New York. Outside for the most part, summer heat, and in a forest. It was a pretty setting to read an unsettling story. The novel unfolds in frightening detail while flowered with Morrison's powerful and poetic prose. Her strength in storytelling transmitted with so few words; the book itself is only 160 pages, and there is immeasurable talent in that economy to convey the bleak reality of young Pecola Breedlove's life, our view of her through her peer Claudia, and a whole cast of people in 1940s Lorain, Ohio. I found myself rereading passages, transfixed by how Morrison was able to string together these everyday words into a searing portrayal of African-American life, full of unforgettable imagery and themes. To understand something in her way; to be let in and acknowledge the horror of the generational trauma and pain. There are not many writers like Morrison. I've found none like her; she may be singular. And she doesn't write for me, but I'm grateful to read her words.