Work Is Love Made Visible
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Synopsis:
Both homespun and sophisticated, this book of poems and family memories carries a bite: the author is an Oklahoma woman with a history of hard traveling and a feminist intellectual with a formidable critical vocabulary. She writes in a language of solidarity, affirmation, and love. The story of the daughter who left home, traveled the country, and returned to do her family proud is still worth telling: add to that the heartbreak, lustiness, traditional wisdom, Okie determination, and Indian legacy of these poems and you have quite a bundle. The historic family photographs are breathtaking in their own right: beyond any job of archaeology, they speak the world they portray.
Book Excerpt:
for the people of new orleans
because i have seen visions of the apocalypse on cable tv
my poems have taken a turn to the biblical
it is not the natural disaster i cannot comprehend
we live and we die by nature's hand
the man-made catastrophe is what stuns me
thousands of abject human beings trapped
in the civic center and the superdome
hunched under the eaves of their inundated homes
days after the hurricane passed
how can we ever explain to ourselves and to our children
the unanswered chant of "help, help, help, help"
echoing through drowned new orleans for six days
long enough, it is said, to create heaven and earth
Author Comment:
More poems from the collection can be found on my website, www.jeanettacalhounmish.com.
Topics/Categories:
20th century women's lives; photography & photojournalism, Oklahoma, Rural Life, Work
Type of Work:
Publishers:
University of New Mexico Press
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Original Publish Date:
February 28, 2009
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