Eavan Boland says that Lynn’s poems ‘have rare power: they connect to the world through estrangement.’ Yes, but that may sound forbidding. They’re also enormously playful and witty. She has an ‘Homage to Sharon Stone;’ she speaks in the voice of a depressed book; she even, as in the following excerpt, speaks from inside Gertrude Stein.
—Ed Ochester
excerpt from inside gertrude stein
Right now as I am talking to you and as you are being talked to, without letup, it is becoming clear that gertrude stein has hijacked me and that this feeling that you are having now as you read this, that this is what it feels like to be inside gertrude stein. This is what it feels like to be a huge typewriter in a dress. Yes, I feel we have gotten inside gertrude stein, and of course it is dark inside the enormous gertrude, it is like being locked up in a refrigerator lit only by a smiling rind of cheese. Being inside gertrude is like being inside a monument made of a cloud which is always moving across the sky which is also always moving. Gertrude is a huge galleon of cloud anchored to the ground by one small tether, yes, I see it down there, do you see that tiny snail glued to the tackboard of the landscape? That is alice. So, I am inside gertrude; we belong to each other, she and I, and it is so wonderful because I have always been a thin woman inside of whom a big woman is screaming to get out, and she’s out now and if a river could type this is how it would sound, pure and complicated and enormous.
“inside gertrude stein”
from American Poetry Now
$27.95 • 408 pp.
© 2007 University of Pittsburgh Press
Also by Lynn Emanuel from the Pitt Poetry Series:
Then, Suddenly— $14.00
American Poetry Now features poems by Lynn Emanuel and many others from the Pitt Poetry Series.
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Author: The Best American Poetry
