Recent reads on Goodreads...

My recent review on Goodreads of Anna Moschovakis's YOU AND THREE OTHERS ARE APPROACHING A LAKE.

Now I am not a poetry person (I hate admitting that. Makes me feel like one of those who says they don't get art or "I don't know porn but I know it when I see it..."). You get the drift, basically I am saying I am not an educated poetry reader. (Also makes me sad if people were to say that about short stories --and I'm sure they do-- but it would break my heart).

I loved this -- poetry as cultural criticism, but still moving/emotional. Poetry for the kindof gal I am and was growing up --that is the kind that had a crush on John Ruskin as a teen and quoting Das Kapital in unsavory places. It's a book that looks at the economics of the world with a hard and loving eye. It's generous and critical.

To quote from page 19 part of the first poem in the book:

It has been said (following Ruskin) that 

"The production of base forms of art in painting, music, the drama, literature, the plastic arts, must necessarily entail the highest human costs, the largest loss of human welfare, individual and social. For such an artist poisons not only his own soul but the social soul, adulterating the food designed to nourish the highest faculties of man."

In other words:

     Language: it is fun to watch

     but it's even more fun to play

or

      More than 2,000 persons have been killed in theater collapses in the past ten years.

or

      Adulteration packed the life preservers of the General Slocum

      with sawdust instead of cork

      as she sank with all on board.

Oh, and the other awesome thing about the book -- inspired by books from the lovely Bibliobarn in South Kortright, NY. Aka the Sticks.