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Rated: E · Book · Writing · #2044345
Writing about what I have been reading and encountering in the media.
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October 20, 2022 at 12:47am
October 20, 2022 at 12:47am
#1039440
BOOK

Beer, Nicky, The Octopus Game, Carnegie University Press, Pittsburgh, 2015. Poetry

Who would even think of writing an entire book of poetry about cephalopods? It seems this is nearly what Nicky Beer has done. When I picked up the book, I expected a poem or two about an octopus or a squid, but not half of the book! Ms. Beer describes them in the loveliest ways:
"a heavy-lidded proprietress who is all raised hem and no flirt." Occasionally, she digresses into discussion of humans, as in "Please indicate the total number of sexual partners (male and/or female) ____." She imagines "them in her third-grade classroom." Then, a couple or so of poems about this or that but the talk of the octopus resumes, once as a showgirl in a side-show. The "game" seems to me to be about adaptation and resistance to adaptation. Her imagery is fresh and sometimes startling: In "Marlene Dietrich reads Rilke on the Lido, 1937," she writes "The latest La Stampa is crumpled at her feet like a cheap towel, a crab dozing on Stalin's mustache." She ends "Black Hole Itinerary" with "Today, love will be like starlight; when it arrives, whatever it comes from will have already collapsed." Her use of language is rich and substantial and luscious. I hope you will choose to read this delightful book.


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