"Transformations" by Anne Sexton (published 1971)



Brilliant, beautiful, sad. With slight sardonic quips and a strong sense for dysfunction, my only complaint is the shrinking of wonder by Sexton’s unveiling of a darker, more painful sense of the martyr’s plight. That may be what Sexton got wrong: that the main character of the fairy-tale is saintly. No, only unknowing, lacking scheme, lacking artifice. Still, the seventeen poems based off of fairy-tales in “Transformations” are brilliant, beautiful, and sad all the same. For all souls who may feel a bit jaded with the world, this one’s for you.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"No One Is Too Small To Make A Difference" by Greta Thunberg (2018, 2019)

Image
  A collection of Greta Thunberg's speeches from her travels in 2018 and 2019, No One Is Too Small To Make A Difference is a wrenching written account of her tireless determination to spread solid information - indeed, the Facts - about the global Climate Emergency that is a hallmark moment of the 21st century, not to mention for humanity's epoch in totality. Thunberg introduces herself simply. She just barely mentions her accolades, her academic history, her work history. The most personal she gets is very personal, talking about her fraught fight with her parents to strike for the climate, her younger sister that she worries for, how she misses her dogs, and the collective future of humankind that has found itself hanging in the balance. She leaves the audience with an appropriate onslaught of numbers, percentages, data-driven information regarding how much time (10 - 15 years, if that) we have to turn the Climate Emergency around and what we need to do about it (decidedly...
Read more

"Requiem for a Dream" by Hubert Selby, Jr. (published 1978)

Image
I'm glad I finally read Hubert Selby Jr.'s "Requiem for a Dream" (1978) after years of having a copy of the book on my shelf and never getting to it. I've seen the movie, directed by Darren Aronofsky (2000), several times, but Selby's book has so much more resonance, though if one has seen the film even once those images don't disappear as you read the words of this story.  The words seem to flow from the author without much pre-conception: "Requiem for a Dream" is free from any sense of being contrived. The story and its style (which is a variant of stream-of-consciousness) is beautiful in its simplicity and for the authors clear talent for telling it like it is. A story like this doesn't need much more.  What a reader might be able to grasp from the book rather than from watching the film is the idea that the kids in this book really don't know how to care for anything but their own souls. It's as if they've never really le...
Read more

"They Called Us Enemy" by George Takei (published 2019)

Image
George Takei's graphic novel - illustrated by Harmony Becker and co-written with Justin Eisinger and Steven Scott - is an important entry into American history that, for the most part, has not been delved into at depth (and very much should be). Takei's graphic novel, They Called Us Enemy , chronicles his life's memory beginning with a short childhood spent in California and then only a little bit later, the rest of his childhood spent in Japanese Internment Camps set-up by the U.S. government during World War II due to a attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese government. Takei's journey is an astounding glimpse into a world fraught with racial politics; the problems with defining people, especially immigrants, by their ethnicity, and the extreme, wieldy, power an unlawful government has to wreak havoc on a person's identity, physical and mental, by means of vocabulary (images of the wartime propaganda are shown), ideological impositions on/of "law" (the j...
Read more