Poem for the Day: November 9th, 2021

…the way Corral repeats and inverts the imagery of thorns and honey in the first and last lines of the poem lend it a freshness and vivacity not always seen in (unrequited) love poems.

Autobiography of My Hungers by Eduardo C. Corral

His beard: an avalanche of   honey,
                   an avalanche
of  thorns. In a bar too close to the Pacific,
                            he said, “I don’t love you,
               but not because I
couldn’t be attracted to you.” Liar—
                                     even my soul
is potbellied. Thinness,
         in my mind, equals the gay men
                                      on the nightly news.
        Kissed by death & public scorn.
The anchorman declaring,
                             “Weight loss is one
        of the first symptoms.” The Portuguese
have a word for imaginary, never-
                   to-be-experienced love.
                                      Whoop-de-doo.
        “I don’t love you,” he said.
The words flung him back—
                            in his eyes, I saw it—
         to another bar
where a woman sidestepped his desire.
                  Another hunger.
                                    Our friendship.
In tenth grade, weeks after
                             my first kiss, my mother
said, “You’re looking thinner.”
         That evening, I smuggled a cake
                                      into my room.
I ate it with my hands,
                   licked buttercream off
                            my thumbs until I puked.
         Desire with no future,
bitter longing—
                   I starve myself  by yearning
          for intimacy that doesn’t
                                        & won’t exist.
Holding hands on a ferry. Tracing,
                   with the tip of my tongue,
a  jawline. In a bar too close
                                to the Pacific, he said,
“I don’t love you, but not
          because I couldn’t be attracted to you.”
                                    His beard:
an avalanche of thorns,
                  an avalanche of honey.

I love the way Corral compares unrequited love to boundless hunger in this poem. Comparing the desire for food with the desire for love or sex is far from new—one need only watch Tom Jones (1963) to see a perfect example—but the way Corral repeats and inverts the imagery of thorns and honey in the first and last lines of the poem lend it a freshness and vivacity not always seen in (unrequited) love poems.

Do you have a favorite poem comparing unrequited love with physical hunger? Let me know in the comments or shoot me an email.

Books by Eduardo C. Corral (With Purchase Links)

*Slow Lightning (Yale Series of Younger Poets)* by Eduardo C. Corral and Carl Phillips (Foreword)

*Guillotine: Poems* by Eduardo C. Corral

Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.

Quote for the Day: November 9th, 2021

Seek to be whole, not perfect.
Oprah Winfrey

Poem for the Day: November 8th, 2021

Night Work by Ed Bok Lee

All summer, the city engine's low
roar capsizes our bodies into sleep,
groans,
                evacuation—
                                                   Lost to a watery
anamnesis so warm it requires a raft
thatched from death's
                                         flotsam to necklace its shore

                              I swim on, calling your name

In my dreams, something is always deserting

But tonight, no fast shadows of birds
No oceanic flowers disrobing butterflies
or bright beach of child's porridge and bones—

                                                                                 Instead, someone weaving

a net from fallen hair in and around our bed
to catch the breath, blood, and ritual
motions that oiled us
                                            as one candle in a cave

In your dreams, someone is always resisting being saved

My teeth are on fire, you say I said

Don't fly for the labyrinth, once
I thought you were admonishing me to go away
I don't remember most others, a thousand seasons
phonographed in through a wounded window

Everyone can't have a cactus

Just o.k. empty all the rice from my legs

Once I awoke screaming, paws red-hot embers
You opened my mouth and poured a night-cold river in

Once you died and my heart fished all winter

Once we were eating lunch inside a kiln

Once you thought you smelled death,
but the lavender farm was too large to shave

On the fifth straight morning I'd dreamt of water
I stared at your face, its nacreous lids, 
and I swear I could see a Glorious Ghost shifting
over your sun-warm waves

Water my birth sign, and one day my mother's death
that protect-fills my love with sadness

There, in words to my coworkers
it was still dripping, in my nods
over a galapagos of pages and forms

All love is immigrant, that autumn apparently
I mumbled

Your reply, after days: Turn off the steam in the trees

Somewhere right now, two lovers are conversing
without even knowing what their lives mean

One's heart gazelle-quick to survey a mountain his dead
              father is always vandalizing
The other frequently misplacing her hair, ears, or self-
sabotaging a crime

One usually struggling to stay alive
The other often untethering something

Or is it my mitochondria that powder-sugars the moon?
And you calcifying a promise inside to inscribe?

There is a dominion where inverses
invert until only terror, love, and imagination cling,

heavy, on human branches—enter your vista, phylum
unsequenced, dimmer deeds

Can you hear it tonight?
Wind in iron jars buried inside the living:
Grandmothers, past spouses, cable men, priests

Now! I finally manage
as our train smokes out all the rats on their bed of leaves

All night, I dive
down to the soft structures of some blue civilization's faith

In this myth of life, I keep forgetting whose ideas and
              sensations I'm supposed to be

Come morning: rain, trees, silvery
sleet
              and daily, this new fresh bounty
                                                                        we share, side by side
like angels coming home from work at a pearl factory

Quote for the Day: November 8th, 2021

The ocean does not apologize for its depth and the mountains do not seek forgiveness for the space they take and so, neither shall I.
Becca Lee

All Aboard the ARC: Matias and the Cloud by Jorge G. Palomera and Ana Sanfelippo (Illustrator)

***Note: I received a free digital review copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.***

We must be entering a golden age for wordless picture books. In October, Anthony and the Gargoyle by Jo Ellen Bogart (originally reviewed on my blog here) hit shelves and warmed the hearts of readers everywhere. And anyone who missed Aaron Becker’s wordless Journey trilogy would be doing themselves a great disservice by not acquiring it immediately. Now, we have this little gem due to be released on February 22nd of next year by Clarion Books. Talk about an embarrassment of riches.

Once the guests have left and all but one of the presents have been unwrapped, Matias and his dog discover something quite spectacular in the last gift: a magic cloud.

Matias and the Cloud opens on the morning of Matias’s birthday. His family throws him a big party to celebrate his special day, with cake and a piñata and presents stacked high just waiting to be unwrapped. Once the guests have left and all but one of the presents have been unwrapped, Matias and his dog discover something quite spectacular in the last gift: a magic cloud.

This enchanted cloud is no ordinary fluffnugget of condensed vapor. On the contrary, this cloud can float and bounce and do all sorts of neat things.

This enchanted cloud is no ordinary fluffnugget of condensed vapor. On the contrary, this cloud can float and bounce and do all sorts of neat things. What will Matias and his dog get up to with their new friend? You’ll have to get it yourself to find out.

Matias and the Cloud is due to be released by Clarion Books on February 22nd, 2022 and is available to preorder wherever books are sold.

All Aboard the ARC: I Love You, Call Me Back: Poems by Sabrina Benaim

***Note: I received a free digital review copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.***

Sabrina Benaim has gifted us with a collection that is both a blueprint for grief and a roadmap to help us find our way out of it.

With I Love You, Call Me Back, Sabrina Benaim has gifted us with a collection that is both a blueprint for grief and a roadmap to help us find our way out of it. It’s not an easy task to meld hope and despair together in the same poem without coming off as maudlin or worse, melodramatic, but Benaim manages to do so with the grace and panache of an assured stylist.

Her voice rings so clear and true that while reading her new collection I felt like I was having a conversation with an old friend, one with whom I could share my highest hopes and biggest fears. After the past nineteen months of dealing with the isolation brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, finally someone is saying that everything is not okay, but it will be eventually. And in the meantime, we can hold space for small joys, of which I count this poetry collection as one of them.

I Love You, Call Me Back: Poems was released by Plume, a division of Penguin Random House, on October 19th, 2021 and is now available to purchase wherever books are sold.

Poem for the Day: November 7th, 2021

The Nail by C.K. Williams

Some dictator or other had gone into exile, and now reports were coming about his regime,
the usual crimes, torture, false imprisonment, cruelty and corruption, but then a detail:
that the way his henchmen had disposed of enemies was by hammering nails into their skulls.
Horror, then, what mind does after horror, after that first feeling that you’ll never catch your breath,
mind imagines—how not be annihilated by it?—the preliminary tap, feels it in the tendons of the hand,
feels the way you do with your nail when you’re fixing something, making something, shelves, a bed;
the first light tap to set the slant, and then the slightly harder tap, to em-bed the tip a little more ...

No, no more: this should be happening in myth, in stone, or paint, not in reality, not here;
it should be an emblem of itself, not itself, something that would mean, not really have to happen,
something to go out, expand in implication from that unmoved mass of matter in the breast;
as in the image of an anguished face, in grief for us, not us as us, us as in a myth, a moral tale,
a way to tell the truth that grief is limitless, a way to tell us we must always understand
it’s we who do such things, we who set the slant, embed the tip, lift the sledge and drive the nail,
drive the nail which is the axis upon which turns the brutal human world upon the world.

© 1999 C.K. Williams. “The Nail” appeared as part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Repair, which was published in 1999 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. It is available to purchase wherever books are sold.

Quote for the Day: November 7th, 2021

Choose, everyday to forgive yourself. You are human, flawed, and most of all worthy of love.
Alison Malee

Poem for the Day: November 6th, 2021

Autumn by Grace Paley

1

What is sometimes called a   
   tongue of flame
or an arm extended burning   
   is only the long
red and orange branch of   
   a green maple
in early September   reaching
   into the greenest field
out of the green woods   at the
   edge of which the birch trees   
appear a little tattered   tired
   of sustaining delicacy
all through the hot summer   re-
   minding everyone (in   
our family) of a Russian
   song   a story
by Chekhov   or my father


2

What is sometimes called a   
   tongue of flame
or an arm extended   burning
   is only the long
red and orange branch of
   a green maple
in early September   reaching   
   into the greenest field
out of the green woods   at the   
   edge of which the birch trees
appear a little tattered   tired
   of sustaining delicacy
all through the hot summer   re-
   minding everyone (in   
our family) of a Russian
   song   a story by
Chekhov or my father on
   his own lawn   standing   
beside his own wood in
   the United States of   
America   saying (in Russian)
   this birch is a lovely
tree   but among the others
   somehow superficial

© 1991 Grace Paley. “Autumn” first appeared in Long Walks and Intimate Talks by Grace Paley and Vera B. Williams, which was published in 1991 by The Feminist Press at the City University of New York. It was later included in Begin Again: The Collected Poems of Grace Paley, which was published in 1999 by The Feminist Press. You can read more about Grace Paley and her life and work here.

Quote for the Day: November 6th, 2021

You don’t have to move mountains. Simply fall in love with life. Be a tornado of happiness, gratitude and acceptance. You will change the world just by being a warm, kind hearted human being.
Anita Krizzan