Susan M. Schultz

This book of prose poetry started life as a blog. It has kept many of its blog trappings: date and time stamps, a note of the number of comments on each post (though not the comments themselves), and every so often a list of links ('About me', 'View my complete profile' and so on, but not any actual URLs). More consequentially, the entries appear in reverse chronological order, as in an archived blog. The blog itself is no longer on line – at least, my googling attempts came up with zip.

In just over 50 'blog entries', most of them roughly one and a half pages long,we move from January 2007, when the poet's mother is living in a dementia facility, back to the beginning of August 2006, when the poet and her family visit the mother who is still living at home with the kind of difficulty and drama familiar to anyone who has a relative with deepening dementia. So there's a strong narrative backbone to the book. But this isn't a novel: within the blog entries, narrative does not rule. They reflect the multiple roles of the writer: daughter of a woman with deepening dementia; mother of two adopted children, five and seven years old and learning to read and write; creative writing teacher variously dismayed and stimulated by her students; citizen responding to the egregiousness of Bush & Rumsfeld; poet reflecting on poetics and the work of other poets, and also - of course - doing the thing that poets do with language and experience, which includes butting those different subjects up against each other, interweaving them, sometimes fusing, even confusing them, finding meaning and clues to meaning in them.

I expect to reread it many times.… (plus d'informations)