Last night’s BROOKLYN READING WORKS was pretty incredible.
Rachel Vigier’s stark and wise poems grapple with the ghosts of Lower Manhattan after 9/11. With a hyper awareness of the body – the way in which we are all just flesh and bones, Rachel reveals how vulnerable we are to destruction and sudden disappearance. No experience – her daughter’s bath, a trip to Florence, an emergency room hours after Vigier’s escape from a downtown building on 9/11 – is without a pensive awareness of the body – the bones of who we are both mentally and physically. Ghosts are everywhere in Vigier’s poetry as is the idea that history touches all that we do and every place that we are.
Kim Larsen’s gripping essay, "When the Middle is the End," deals unflinchingly with the death of her friend, Laurel, three years ago. Everyone looked stunned when it was over and it left the crowd feeling pretty raw. In her masterful prose, Kim evoked her friendship with Laurel with humor, honesty, surprising language and sharp details about her friends pain and suffering, and her own inability to accept the inevitable even within days of the end.
The night Laurel cooked us dinner, a week or two earlier, after she
ladled the soup and cut the bread and tossed the salad and poured the
wine, then toted her nutrition contraption over to the table and
hoisted up her blouse and plugged in the hose to the slot in her
midriff; after she shrugged wryly and jotted on her pad: Bon appetit!
After I excused myself as casually as I could and fled to the bathroom
to reason with my reflection in the mirror that if Laurel could do this
then so could I; after I checked on Abe and Anya, who had eaten their
dinner earlier and were now curled up together on Josh and Laurel’s
bed, mesmerized, watching “The Parent Trap;” after I returned to the
table and tasted my soup, which was delicious, and seemed to blaze a
trail for more soup to follow; after Jim and Laurel discussed some of
the things he’d investigated for her about text-to-voice technology;
after Laurel mused on her notepad about the possibility of taking the
kids back to Tuscany and renting another villa, as we’d done when they
were three; after we cleared the plates and lapsed into silence and
said goodnight because we were tired; after we got home and I flung
myself into bed, I wondered aloud to Jim:“What will become of her?”
In a matter of days, we knew
An excerpt from this essay will appear in May’s Parenting Magazine. It will also be included in an anthology about middle age that is coming out from the University of Arizona Press next year.
Rachel Vigier’s book, The Book of Skeletons, is forthcoming from Pedlar Press in Canada.