Cottonwood Fall 2014

Cottonwood is a review of literary arts published once yearly. It is supported by the Department of English of the University of Kansas. Thanks to Robin for having this around, and letting me experience and enjoy the tales inside.

Quotes and thoughts while reading:

Hot Rail: had this intensity to it, this feeling of energy and this sense of how "new" everything was for our main character. It was short, but enveloping. I really liked the imagery.

For Unknown Reasons: I liked it, the story was engaging and interesting, and I liked how Ana and Kelly were fleshed out a bit, but honestly, at the end, I didn't really get it. Ana seemed to snap, real quick, from laugh about the card, to telling Kelly to go home, and it seemed like she was sabotaging a relationship that she could have had and enjoyed. Realistic for sure, I just would have a liked a little more depth into that decision, so I could really understand why she chose that. I mean, I can see, how given her family life, and who Kelly is, and his family life, how she could see it might not work; I just thought the change was abrupt.

Power Through the Lamb: Woof, reading the title again, after reading the short has so much power. I skip over titles sometimes, and this one comes back with a wallop. Disturbing, frenzying, it was good and potent, and the repeated elements were both frustrating and endearing, everything they are supposed to be. I liked this one, I remember this one.

A couple of poems to eternalize here, I just don't want to lose them when I lose this book:

Night Passage: Tom Hansen

We labored through darkness
to reach that far shore,
held on tight, heaved by wild seas,
as our fragile craft shuddered, surrendered,
and sank.

We woke up marooned
on this island of light,
tangled in each other's arms.
Scattered about us, the radiant wreckage
of love.

Eighth-grade Band Recital: Mark Jackley _{(I also really liked the structure of this one)}

Then,
midway through the song
the music wanders off
in a dozen different directions,
spilling out like shirttails,
like the kids themselves when the very last bell rings
in June and someone brushes
bangs from hazel eyes,
glances furtively and zig-zags down the halls
as boys bounce off the walls,
one later gazing out
the window of the bus, listening to the score
of his soul composing
itself, before he tears
into a bag of Cheese Curls
and licks his fingers clean
of the orange sort of
moon dust as the wheels
on the bus and in his heart
turn, a melody
unencumbered by anything
with anything
like bars.

Hawaii: was interesting, with the ending tyeing a really good bow around everything. When I was reading it, I kept getting memories of the islands from when I was there, and there was even a moment where I could smell the ocean breeze, a testament to the author, for painting the scene so vividly.

Revealing: Hmm, the idea of a hairless body, to serve as a canvass to a tattoo artists, is a fun one to entertain. The short was really great in that it made me want to see what I was reading, and I have an image in my mind of what this woman would look like, but I still want to see it. Maybe even run my fingers along the tattooed patterns. I found it fascinating to imagine how her curves and depth would disappear as the tattoos covered more and more of her body.

You're Really In It Now: Whew, alcoholism man. This really perfectly captures alcoholism, and it's sad. "Your hands are not jittery now: they feel filled with water, with something heavier than water... You were someplace quiet, airless, disconnected. You found out you could keep that feeling if you took a sip or two of rum before driving to school, and then you found out you could keep it again with Jamaican coffee during lunch-- the school provided the coffee, you them rum. You'd be sitting in the teachers' lounge drinking coffee with them, but they never knew what else you had in your cup." (p 98) It's really great writing, but man does it feel real, and it's scary.