Reading Mother's Urn: Memoir Dust was a fantastical experience for me. The book acted like music, in that nonverbal, visceral way, creating a dream so fleeting and hard to touch that I had to linger at each portrait. It was hard to describe. From a design standpoint, the text bothered me aesthetically--red on black hurts the eyes--but on a literary standpoint, the mixture of text and variation of style and size reminded me of the high and low notes of a musical composition, and when they were paired with the portraits, it worked. Mother's Urn is a pandora's box. It's emotionally vibrant and haunting. It leaves you with questions but with enough space to contemplate how to infuse the fictional dream into memoir.
My favorite part was Christmas Myth. I love the structure of this section. It begins with the parents' love, and the lines "Those mouths of / merlot and mint, spilling hot and life / tales back and forth" stayed with me. Also the first and second art pieces of this piece were the most haunting, personally, in the book. The carved out children on the woman's wrists left me speechless. The blood draining from the woman's and man's eyes was shifted me visually, like a car crash. The poem read like a car crash. You're speeding down this marriage with the narrator and you end up being swallowed up by the bitterness and passion.
I also really, really loved the artwork in Somebody's Mother. It struck chords I deep within me because I don't like talking about my mother. The women in the drawings looked serene and then would shift into an angry glance which I somehow understood. Although Kalamity J creates this incredibly intricate and complicated dream, we somehow reach an entry point through her imagery and tonality that we come to understand her pain. It's a great book that left me cold. I read it on the plane coming back from AWP, and somehow was able to slip into its compelling and relentless dream.
One of the last images of the child's back and the countless mothers/bodies meshing into the background stayed with me. The poem's feelings of alienation and desire became so evocative and impressed on me a yearning I've stucked away for a long time. The line grabbed me: "lonely forgiveness."
"The book acted like music, in that nonverbal, visceral way, creating a dream so fleeting and hard to touch that I had to linger at each portrait."
ReplyDeleteI think you nailed it there. Beautifully expressed and that was my experience, too. I find that the detail is still coming clear to me...there's so much that it has to seep in slowly; it's impossible to take everything in at once. In fact, it isn't even pleasant to try because that can be overwhelming. Letting it in a little at a time feels much more appropriate.
Relating the memoir to a car crash is perfect--it has that weird slow-motion-quickness to it that is indescribable to any other event. We can see each detail, and notice how long it takes to absorb, and its so interesting which parts stick with us in the end, like a color or a shape or even a smell.
ReplyDeleteThe senses are incredibly fascinating to me, and I felt like Mother's Urn created an experience that catered to many of the senses.
Car crash! Music! Viscera!
ReplyDeleteWe are being manipulated by this soc cacophony
Anyway, good job Melissa, i was interested in what the visual artists would have to say about what they saw and so i want more.
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Yes, music! The rhythm, the flow, the silences all performed a lot in this work. The swirling lines next to the conventionally laid out text like on page two, seem to waft in like a melody line from off stage. Without boxes and lines and accompanied by the swirling lines of the illustrations, the poetry of the text provided the drum beat by which to view the piece.
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