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Why America Is Ready For Novelist Angela Flournoy
After raising Detroit’s ghosts in her critically acclaimed novel, The Turner House, this debut author suddenly has everyone’s attention.
(photography by Laura McDermott)
Sight Specific: National Book Award Poets Share a Source of Visual Inspiration for a Selected Poem
– From Brenda Hillman’s Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, Longlisted for the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry. Reprinted with the permission of Wesleyan University Press. Photograph courtesy of the author.
Sight Specific is a series of 10 posts highlighting the National Book Awards 2013 Longlist for Poetry. For more information about Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, click here. For the complete Longlist, click here.
Sight Specific: National Book Award Poets Share a Source of Visual Inspiration for a Selected Poem
My uncle Edmund had polio.
I’ve lived in a time
of polio. Of malaria. Of yellow fever.
Uncle Edmund was my grandfather’s brother.
My grandfather loved him dearly. He looked
after him with the duty of a beloved.
This is what it means to love
in a time of epic infection, to tend
after the inflicted with the understanding
that we’re all mandated to live
through massive trauma.
Uncle Edmund lived in Tunapuna.
We lived in Arouca. Sometimes
my grandmother sent me to take
food to Uncle Edmund in metal
food carriers. It was four miles away.
Sometimes I’d walk and spend
the taxi fare on beer on my way back.
I was ten. I lived in the time
of walking places. I will tell
my children this. I am forty-two.
I will probably not have any.
It is Sunday morning at a lover’s
house and I am on the verge
of weeping as I say this. The food
was always still hot when I got there.
It was a tropical country. You could
walk four miles with a tray of hot
food and have it stay hot. I lived
in a time of heat. Uncle Edmund’s
house smelled dank, cool. I remember
it as always dark. This might be a lie.
I unhinged the trays from the carrier,
got an enamel plate from the cupboard
and dished the food out for him so
I could take back the empty carrier. So
I could bring him food next day. I’d pour
him juice made from reconstituted oranges
and mixed with water and sugar. He talked.
The polio made it hard to understand him,
but I nodded, asked him if everything
was to his liking. I’ve lived
in a time of duty is what I want
to tell my children. I’ve lived
in a time of love. My lover
brings me the hottest, bitterest
coffee. I am grateful for this
but I am weeping for my nonchildren.
I never lingered at Uncle Edmund’s,
never waited until the end of his meal.
My grandfather waited until the end
of his meals, when he went. I went
once with my grandfather. He spoke
to his brother in low, almost dulcet
tones. I’d never heard him speak
like that before. My grandfather
loved my mother dearly. She was
his adopted child, but he held us both
closer than blood. I tell you I’ve lived
in a time of miracles. I’ve lived
because of miracles and I want
to tell my children this.
That is all. That is the magic
of old age—immense loss
side by side with love. How amazing
to be Uncle Edmund, to be loved
in a time of polio and malaria
and yellow fever and dysentery.
My grandfather buried
Uncle Edmund in the family plot.
He lit candles on All Saints’ Day.
I think we were the only ones
at the funeral. This is also what it means
to live in a time of polio, to be buried
unknown, but not less loved
than the pope or president. I want
to tell my children this. We are
all worried about not being good
enough for love. Imagine all we have.
Imagine all we love and live through.
Imagine what a chance we have
to endure the very worst
that might come our way.
– From Roger Bonair-Agard’s Bury My Clothes, Longlisted for the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry. Reprinted with permission of Haymarket Books. Photograph courtesy of the author.
Sight Specific is a series of 10 posts highlighting the National Book Awards 2013 Longlist for Poetry. For more information about Bury My Clothes, click here. For the complete Longlist, click here.
"Designing a book cover is great because you can treat it as a piece of packaging, a mini poster, corporate identity, something to use illustration on, or photography, be purely typographical, figurative or conceptual with just the right amount of type to play around with, have complete ownership; and even if you mess up totally, nobody dies.”
Edward O. Wilson, naturalist and author, 85, at Walden Pond in Massachusetts. Wilson published a book, ‘‘The Meaning of Human Existence,’’ this year. It is the second in a trilogy.
You are the world’s foremost expert on ants, and now you’re asking about the meaning of human existence and the future of humanity. Has growing older pushed you to these bigger questions?
I couldn’t have asked these questions before. I was too engaged in the hands-on research, especially in the field.
So how has age contributed to your more recent books?
I think age contributed a great deal to my undertaking in this recent trilogy of books. First because I feel I have enough experience to join those who are addressing big questions. Second is because about 10 years ago, when I began reading and thinking more broadly about the questions of what are we, where did we come from and where are we going, I was astonished at how little this was being done. I’ve come to appreciate that we’re wrecking the planet, especially in the living part of the planet. The public response and the intellectual response to that particular crisis have just been unacceptably weak.
Now that you’re 85, how do you see your future?
I haven’t sensed anything, and I don’t think others have sensed yet that’s an obvious deterioration of what I’m doing. When I feel it I’ll stop. What I’ll do then is try to take more time in going back to the field with my butterfly net.
2014 National Book Award Finalist Edward O. Wilson featured in The New York Times' Old Masters at the Top of their Game.
Photographs by Erik Madigan Heck
The Writer’s Room in T Magazine gives an intimate glimpse into the working spaces of some of our favorite authors. Like this portrait of Colson Whitehead, who recently DJ’d our 5 Under 35 Celebration and has just published The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death.
Photo: Magnus Unnar
Kudos to this writer who dared to break the feminine conventions of female author photos.
As promised, here are my photos of 2013 National Book Award honorees and nominees, taken on the red carpet last night at Cipriani on Wall Street. At top, we have best-dress-ed Jhumpa Lahiri, followed by George Saunders, Jesmyn Ward, and James McBride, who took home the coveted fiction prize for The Good Lord Bird.
A complete list of the winner is here.
I loved that McBride credited his protagonist, “that good American John Brown,” for helping him through his grief over two deaths and the dissolution of his marriage:
Honest James McBride says “it was always nice to have someone else’s life to fall back into” after a difficult few years.
— Shelley (Diaz) Vale (@sdiaz101)
A lovely night, to be sure. Not pictured: Saunders at the after-party dancing to Bob Dylan with his wife, with a stack of books in hand.
alwaysbringabookwithyou
