assignment #2-emanuelle sippy-words are a lot sometimes

This year I didn’t read nearly enough books. I did, however, enjoy an array of poetry. The most noteworthy being Adriene Rich’s Diving Into The Wreck. Particularly, “Dialogue,” more succinct than most of her works yet encompassing a whole story—a motif in centuries of women's experiences. Her words struck me and continue to do so, sometimes each syllable includes thinking and other times I read for the rhythm alone. Ntozake Shange’s Wild Beauty was next. Then Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Robin Beth Schar’s Shipwrecking, which was pleasantly different because Robin is a family friend. Many of the questions I wondered about other poets, I already knew the answer to. The back story wasn’t so buried but straddled a space between foreground and foreshadowing.

Isabel Allende’s House of The Spirits, I thoroughly enjoyed but was done on a deadline. I hadn’t read magical realism or anything even remotely similar, since reading real, adult books. I had to read You Are More Powerful Than You Think. The title of which kind of made me gag, but included beautiful (and useful for progressive rants) stories of grassroots movements that I hadn’t known about previously. Back to poetry. Head Off And Split by Nikki Finicky, who I wish was still at U.K.

At a program this summer, I began to make up for my lack of reading with Grace Paley and Isaac Babel's short stories, Celia Dropkin's The Acrobat, Alejandra Pizarnick's A Musical Hell, works of Jorge Luis Borges and Phillip Roth, Clarica Lispector and Franz Kafka. Ayelet Tsabari and Adi Keissar kept my friends and me up all night.

I read Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor and How to Understand Isreal in 60 days Or Less, while I was in the Middle East or more accurately on flights to and from. Right now I’m reading Mary Atin’s The Promised Land. Her prose feels unedited in the best way. Partially because she is channeling muddled thoughts of her childhood self but subsequently inciting vivid emotion in the reader. I think I recommend it but to be determined.