![]() Frowzy in a slatternly direction.” In many of the poems, like this one, characters emerge from a landscape. Tattered shoulders, frayed eyes, a dowdy gray. Slipshod drudge with chance of dingy morning slog. These poems, from three collections published in the 1990s, reveal a poet with an unflinching eye, sifting through the facts for something beautiful. HARRYETTE MULLEN teaches English and African American studies at UCLA. Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge “She threw it in the garbage.” “Shane’s ex-girlfriend was a child prodigy.” There’s something compelling about these vignettes they twist in memory as the reader turns the pages, smug in the knowledge that never in a million years would she let herself sink so low. She ripped it up and left it in a neat pile on his pillow.” Eugenie found a hairclip. “Isabelle found a vacation snapshot of her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend. They always had: thinner ankles, poutier lips, and PhDs.” Ethiopian royalty, muses, ballerinas, unforgettable sex, old journals - it’s all here. It was the women who replaced her that drove her crazy. Inspired by a new boyfriend’s photos of ex-girlfriends, Shapton collected her friends’ fears: “Elizabeth had no problem with exes. Together they describe in the tersest possible way the agonies of curiosity we all suffer over our lovers’ past romances. “LEO’S ex-girlfriend had a cult following.” “Monty’s ex-girlfriend Weronika taught him how to speak Polish.” These and other revelations accompany illustrator / writer Leanne Shapton’s quirky William Steig-like drawings. Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 200 pp., $20 In “On Poverty and Wealth,” the spirit of the gold hoarded by a samurai visits him in the form of a tiny old man who declares: “The Way of wealth is an art - the skillful will accumulate much the foolish will crumble more easily than tiles.” ![]() Akinari seems to mock the virtuous, with their vows of poverty and rigid ideas of how life should be lived. In all of them, the specter of repression lurks under the veil of virtue, waiting to haunt the victim in another form or another life. Some of the tales, like “The Carp of My Dreams,” in which a monk stops breathing and dreams he has become the carp in one of his paintings, resemble parables others, like “The Kibitsu Caldron,” depict the evils of social convention still others, like “The Blue Hood,” examine the vagaries of human nature - the difference between one who can corral his demons to attain Buddhahood and one who cannot. Akinari, born in Osaka in 1734, wrote numerous haiku and two collections of stories about ordinary people and edited several anthologies of Japanese poetry before entering the rainy, moonlighted world of demons and ghosts. These tales by poet and tea master Ueda Akinari were first published in 1776. HERE are the rain-moon tales - gothic accounts of spirits that appear on rainy nights or on mornings when the pale moon is still visible. ![]() ![]() ChambersĬolumbia University Press: 236 pp., $27.50 Ueda Akinari, translated from the Japanese by Anthony H.
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