Tag: The New Yorker

Poem for the Day: September 18th, 2021

Miracle Removal by Kevin Young 

                             i.m. Helen Hill 

This world is rigged
with ruin.

Rain,
and its remains.

In the yard drought
fills the empty jars—

houses on stilts
still lean.

Sweet as revenge, the grass
devours the abandoned

dream house, unfinished kitchen
where cows now graze.

What angels
I would wrestle.

Kevin Young currently serves as the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and has been the poetry editor at The New Yorker since 2017. He was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2020. He previously served as the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. His most recent collection, Stones: Poems, will be released on September 28th, 2021 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group and is now available to preorder wherever books are sold.

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: August 7th, 2021

Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx

Forgive me this brief exposition, but one of the world’s greatest tragedies was Crash “beating” out Brokeback Mountain for the Academy Award for Best Picture. A tender portrait of the lifelong love between two cowboys, Brokeback Mountain was groundbreaking when it first hit theaters in 2005. Far from being just “that gay cowboy movie”, it really brought queer cinema into the mainstream. Whether they were praising it or bashing it (often without having watched it), *everyone* was talking about it.

The performances in this film are some of the best and most evocative in the history of cinema. Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams, and Anne Hathaway all did excellent work, and it is because of their efforts, along with those of Annie Proulx for her source material, Ang Lee for his directorial acumen, and Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana for their faithfully adapted screenplay that the film will be remembered, discussed, and appreciated for as long as moving pictures are considered an art form.

Annie Proulx’s original story (of the same name) on which the film is based was originally published in The New Yorker on October 13th, 1997. It alone is proof that short stories can pack just as much of an emotional wallop as can novels or other works of narrative fiction. A slightly-altered version of the short story was published in the collection pictured above, which was itself a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000. It is from the version published in Close Range: Wyoming Stories that today’s quote is taken.

There was some open space between what he knew and what he believed and nothing could be done about it. And if you can’t fix it, you’ve got to stand it.

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