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laura_sackton's Reviews (170)
Quiet, harsh, full of sky.
Quite beautiful.
This is a beautiful, sparse, sharp, and cutting book about the American Western landscape, but also landscape more broadly. It's about fields, snow, horses, fences, cottonwoods, rivers, fish. There is something both mountainous and pastoral in these poems. They are almost all grounded in very concrete images of western landscapes—but then the landscapes also leap to include the interior, the strange. The poems all seem to be about looking (the snow in the field, the horse standing at the fence, fish on a hook, cottonwoods shedding their blossoms in spring, a barn) but in and among these very solid images are these little flights about being a woman, violence done to women, longing, loss, being lonely. “I pretended / the world was afraid of me because I was alone.” Or “I have my salted methodology.”
Quite beautiful.
This is a beautiful, sparse, sharp, and cutting book about the American Western landscape, but also landscape more broadly. It's about fields, snow, horses, fences, cottonwoods, rivers, fish. There is something both mountainous and pastoral in these poems. They are almost all grounded in very concrete images of western landscapes—but then the landscapes also leap to include the interior, the strange. The poems all seem to be about looking (the snow in the field, the horse standing at the fence, fish on a hook, cottonwoods shedding their blossoms in spring, a barn) but in and among these very solid images are these little flights about being a woman, violence done to women, longing, loss, being lonely. “I pretended / the world was afraid of me because I was alone.” Or “I have my salted methodology.”
There’s this keen longing, and the direct cut of most of the poems seems to mirror not just the landscape itself, the long fields and the snow and the quiet and the rushing streams, but also what the landscape awakes inside the speaker, and how that can in turn change the landscape in this continual cycle. So the landscape isn’t just snow and cottonwoods, but also what the snow has to say about loss, or what the lone horse makes someone feel about fear. The landscape becomes not just solid in the physical world but solid in the emotions it creates that then seep back into it. Why is a field lonely? Is it because of the expanse of snow and white or because of what it feels like looking across one at dusk? And I think in these poems Parks is saying, both—and that it is impossible to separate the two. That a field is made by both the seer and the seen, by both its grasses and its memories, by both what it is and what it seems to be.
My favorite poem is this long sequence, "Letters from a Woman Homesteader", with words taken mostly from a book of the same name published in 1914. One of the most beautiful and incredible parts of this poem are the dates that appear about each letter, like “After winter”, “Sheep-month,” “Haying-time” and “Dove-colored afternoon”. The poems are these little snippets about weather, about the life of the writer, with these incredible spaces left between. In one: “Same woman. Lost here, get tired of loneliness.”
I love the landscapes of these letter poems, which feel tiny and intimate, with news about frosts, birds, cooking, visits, the sheep, the snow. Among and between these, all of these surprising lines that are almost impossible to understand: “myself greatly changed” or “patches of a home.” As if there is this whole story that's not in the poem. The letters are partial erasures, with some brackets of empty space, and there is something about them that feels like a horizon, like the expression of landscape. Here are all these parts, here’s the sheep or a snowstorm that scattered the meadowlarks, here’s an apron or some wind, and then here’s me inside in, changed, lonely, here’s the patches of a home, and none of these things quite add up, like how you can’t quite understand a landscape and what it means just by looking at it. You have to think about how the internal and external, the visible and invisible pieces add up, are talking to each other. And then when you think about how this poem is Parks working in concert with this document, these letters written over a century ago—it’s so moving and so eerie, too. The way landscapes of all different kinds can shift, can stay the same.
Wow, this was like a masterclass in how to write a romance with pacing I hate.
Loved the stuff about losing a queer household.
The pacing made no sense, kinda hated it.
Loved the stuff about losing a queer household.
The pacing made no sense, kinda hated it.
Very weird!
Often very sexy in a dark way!
Liked it a lot!
Often very sexy in a dark way!
Liked it a lot!
Did not like this book even a little bit.
Sorry! Maybe you will.
Sorry! Maybe you will.
Big farm feelings. Lonely and windswept.
Really loved it.
Longer:
A quiet, sparse, open, lonely book about Nebraska, about roads, about being alone in a car on a road, about moving through places, looking at places, seeing or not seeing places. It’s hard to explain the feeling I got reading these poems. It’s a particular farm feeling, a feeling I associate with certain in-between seasons. The book is anchored by a long poem, ‘Like Nebraska’, which is about 50 pages. It’s made up of alternating sections, narrated or about two different speakers, one ‘he’ and one ‘she’. All the sections follow a similar structure, starting with lines like “He stands like a sailor,” “She rustles like a stream,” “He moves like leading lights—” “He wanders like a record” and “She leans like a ladder.”
I couldn’t tell you exactly what this poem is about, except that it evokes this deep loneliness and melancholy that can be between two people, or between a person and place. Reading it made me feel like I did on a late March evening walking a wet field. It reminded me of the smell of manure on a field stretching to the horizon, or of being in an empty farmhouse kitchen on a dark morning. I don’t know how to explain it or describe it except that the sparseness of the poems, the rocking, simple movement of them, their cadence and rhythm, gave me this particular farm feeling, a feeling about being of the earth, using the earth, working with the earth, loving but also feeling disconnected from earth and place.
I assumed these speakers in this poem to be young, and I don’t know if they are, but it also gave me the feeling of dissonance—being young on a farm, being young in an empty rural place, being young and alone on a road or in a barn, these places that are of course full of young people but aren’t often written about the way other kinds of environments of youth are.
Really loved it.
Longer:
A quiet, sparse, open, lonely book about Nebraska, about roads, about being alone in a car on a road, about moving through places, looking at places, seeing or not seeing places. It’s hard to explain the feeling I got reading these poems. It’s a particular farm feeling, a feeling I associate with certain in-between seasons. The book is anchored by a long poem, ‘Like Nebraska’, which is about 50 pages. It’s made up of alternating sections, narrated or about two different speakers, one ‘he’ and one ‘she’. All the sections follow a similar structure, starting with lines like “He stands like a sailor,” “She rustles like a stream,” “He moves like leading lights—” “He wanders like a record” and “She leans like a ladder.”
I couldn’t tell you exactly what this poem is about, except that it evokes this deep loneliness and melancholy that can be between two people, or between a person and place. Reading it made me feel like I did on a late March evening walking a wet field. It reminded me of the smell of manure on a field stretching to the horizon, or of being in an empty farmhouse kitchen on a dark morning. I don’t know how to explain it or describe it except that the sparseness of the poems, the rocking, simple movement of them, their cadence and rhythm, gave me this particular farm feeling, a feeling about being of the earth, using the earth, working with the earth, loving but also feeling disconnected from earth and place.
I assumed these speakers in this poem to be young, and I don’t know if they are, but it also gave me the feeling of dissonance—being young on a farm, being young in an empty rural place, being young and alone on a road or in a barn, these places that are of course full of young people but aren’t often written about the way other kinds of environments of youth are.
The poems in the rest of the book all have variations of the same title, often ‘Driving Through Nevada, Listening to the Radio’ with a different state name. The whole book has this feeling of movement along empty roads and the kinds of thoughts that arise there, the meandering but also revelation that comes with looking at what is around you and thinking about it in a very physical sense. It’s about what roads can do both in the world (places of danger, logistical, practical) and in your brain and heart (a way to ease away from something, a leaving, an untangling, a way to be alone and think, an escape). It's very much a book of journey poems, poems about the movement between ideas, places, memories, loves. There are a lot of sonnets which also gives in a cohesive feel, and a particular rhythm.
The book was written while Klahr drove thousands of miles on loops between Nebraska and California. She composed the poems first mostly by voice note and then edited them. This is so interesting, because you can really feel the driving, the motion, the endless stretches of road in the poems. They feel like road poems, not just in their subject matter but in how they roll around, how they move. It’s quite beautiful.