When I watch Alex Honnold climb, it makes me crave that perfect solitude, the simultaneous rootedness and weightlessness he experiences when the sum total of his existence in that moment hinges on putting one foot in front of the other.
Although the sentences are sparse, each word of “Music for Mister Moon” is laden with the theme of camaraderie and lost childhood.
She alternates long, tumbling sentences with short, clipped ones, like someone desperately trying to avoid thinking about what they’re recounting.
In her writing but in our conversation, too, Dorene O’Brien quietly educated me. On what it means to be a writer and on what it means to cull stories from the world. It was a privilege to have culled hers, here.
“Tinderbox” is the product of the discovery of one of these quiet but salient fractures: the Upstairs Lounge fire.
The book is a tempest, directionless and unpredictable, and within that mess sentences often jump out for their succinct loveliness.
In the face of crushing sentiment, it’s easy to feel like the world is divided up into your foes and your allies, the people who love these places and the people who want to buy them out. I know it’s really a lot less simple and more practical than that: Most of us are regular people, after convenience, not particularly evil or good.
As a person who has been spurned and who has dealt with it through one, two, skip-a-few emotional haircuts, this feels good to read.
This connection between dedication and content is hard to locate in many of the poems. Most serve a symbolic purpose, anchoring the poem in time and memory, making them only accessible for those familiar with the musician or a specific historical instance.
With mounting, almost morbid horror, the novel is impossible to put down.