Reporting from the reading road

So I'm halfway through Little Women, just beginning Part Two and Meg's wedding. And what I do remember now from the first time I read this is that I was unbelievably confused about who Teddy and Laurie were, and only now do I realize that they were both Theodore Laurence. (And somehow I was also confusing him with Teddy Kent from Emily of New Moon, but that's neither here nor is it there). In general, I'm not finding the book too rip-roaring, and am looking hungrily to my to-be-read stack and counting the number of pages left (250). But the experience is not without its joys: though the characters are types, they're also more than a bit surprising, and Jo is as entrancing as Jo's ever were. (Beth, however, I probably will not mourn so much when it's time.) Regarding the types: remember Sarah Liss on Little Women as the original Sex and the City? I also absolutely love the self-consciously omniscient narrator.

It strikes me, however, that this is a children's book in a way that anything penned by L.M. Montgomery is not. I'm revisiting this for the first time since girlhood, and I'm not finding anything new between the lines, unlike when I last reread Anne of Green Gables and discovered the heart of the story is actually Marilla. Also, Little Women is a bit too moralistic, which I realize is the whole point, but it's sort of retchful, no? I know the girls don't always manage to be good, but they're always trying to, and Marmee is so frightfully good (because she's suppressed her terrible temper) and I just feel as though the March family loves one another a little too much in order to compensate for... something.

So, is this sacrilege? What am I missing? Is this a book one has to fall in love with in childhood? Any illumination would be quite welcome.

UPDATE: Part Two has actually proved to be much more interesting. "Literary Lessons" (Jo's adventures in publishing) laid out very clearly the confusing nature of writing feedback. And "Domestic Experiences" (where Meg and Brooke's household descends into chaos when jelly fails to set is funny, poignant, and real). And even Amy's failed posh fete. I am enjoying it more.

Bookish books in the post

I only just noticed that the two books I received in the post today both have books on their covers. On the left, we have The Incident Report by Martha Baillie, a library-set novel. I'd actually requested it from the library, which was fitting, I thought, but when I found I was 146 on the holds list, I decided to buy the book instead. I discovered this book via Melanie's review-- it's structured as a collection of incident reports logged by employees at a public library. As a former library employee myself, I can vouch that these might be as bizarre as you like, and wonder if the fiction will be as wild as fact is. The other book is Shelf Discovery by Lizzie Skurnick, whose Fine Lines column I absolutely adore. As she does in the column, Skurnick rereads "teen classics" in this new book (with guests columnists including Meg Cabot, Laura Lippman and Jennifer Weiner). The reviews are hilarious, insightful and bring back long misplaced memories.

I think that both of these books are going to prove delightful in their own particular ways.

It's hard to be hip over thirty

I've been rereading my copy of poetry collection It's Hard to Be Hip Over Thirty by Judith Viorst (of Alexander's No Good Very Bad Day). My edition is a gorgeous Persephone Book (endpaper as above) and I'm rereading because I'm turning thirty on Wednesday, and as I certainly found it difficult enough to be hip under thirty, I need all the help I can get. From the title poem:

All around New York
Perfect girls with hairpieces and fishnet jumpsuits
Sit in their art nouveau apartments
Discussing things like King Kong
With people like Rudolph Nureyev.

Meanwhile the rest of us
Serving Crispy Critters to grouchy three-year-olds
And drinking our Metrecal,
Dream of snapping our fingers to the music
If only we knew when to snap.

But it's hard to be hip over thirty
When everyone else is nineteenm
When the last dance we learned was the Lindy,
And the last we heard, girls who looked like Barbra Streisand
Were trying to do something about it.

We long to be kicky and camp-- but
The maid only comes once a week.
And since we have to show up for the car pool,
Orgiastic pot parties with cool Negroes who say 'funky' and 'man'
Seem rather impractical.

The Love Song of J. Aldred Prufrock,
Which we learned line by line long ago,
Doesn't swing, we are told, on East Tenth Street,
Where all the perfect girls are switched-on or tuned-in or miscegenated,
But never over thirty
Trying hard
To be hip.

Out of Time

I'm now rereading Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce, prompted by the Harriet/Hatty character within (though ours will be a Hattie, we think, when she's at home). And the book is more pertinent to my current experience than I would ever have imagined, though it could be said that my mind is so mushy and needy that I could be identifying with pretty much anything right about now. But Tom's isolation speaks to me, and his insomnia, and the secret world he creeps about in at night when everyone else is asleep. The secret world wherein the clock strikes thirteen, and I feel like I've been there lately, up with the squalling baby who refuses to eat properly or be satiated. "Only the clock was left, but the clock was always there, time in, time out."

I loved this book as a child, absorbed as I was by all stories of time travel. From Back to the Future to Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer, and A Handful of Time by Kit Pearson, and many more I've surely forgotten. It's odd because I've never liked science-fiction or fantasy in my fiction, but this one element of genre fiction, I've always found so irresistible. Perhaps because the alternate world it plays with is still the very one we live in, which is really the only one that ever interests me, however out of time.

A country where you don't know the language

"The first pregnancy is a long sea journey to a country where you don't know the language, where land is in sight for such a long time that after a while it's just the horizon-- and then one day birds wheel over that dark shape and it's suddenly close, and all you can do is hope like hell that you've had the right shots."-- Emily Perkins, Novel About My Wife

Reliving my own evolution

"I begin to relive at high speed my own evolution towards language, towards stories. Reading books to my daughter revives my appetite for expression. Like someone visiting old haunts after an absence I read books that I have read before, books that I love, and when I do I find them changed: they give the impression of having contained all along everything that I have gone away to learn. I begin to find them everywhere, in pages that I thought familiar; prophecies of what was to come, pictures of the very place in which I now stand, and yet which I look on with no spark of recognition. I wonder how I could have read so much and learned so little. I have stared at these words like the pots and pans, the hoarded gold of a precious civilization, immured in museum glass. Could it be true that one has to experience in order to understand? I have always denied this idea, and yet of motherhood, for me at least, it seems to be the case. I read as if I were reading letters from the dead, letters addressed to me but long unopened; as if by reading I were bringing back the vanished past, living it again as I would like to live every day of my life again, perfectly, without misunderstanding." --Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother

Babies and reading

A few weeks back I was happy to discover that Kate Christensen has a new novel coming out in early June. I'll be reading it, naturally, though when, I cannot say. If I do happen to be 41 weeks pregnant in early June, then perhaps a good book will be welcome company, though it's just as likely I'll be a brand new mother with just a week's experience, so I probably won't be reading much of anything.

There are mothers who read, of course-- mothers of babies and mothers of toddlers. I know this mostly because I read their blogs, and these mothers provide me with a great deal of reassurance. That having my baby won't require handing my brain in (or if it does, at least I get it back in a little while). I've been planning my summer rereading project already, as I always do, and it's mainly consisting of easy, well-loved novels that won't require a great deal of concentration-- I'm thinking Good in Bed, Saturday, Happy All the Time, and, if I'm feeling brave, A Novel About My Wife. It would be nice to read maybe one a week? (At the moment I read about three, but then I also work full time.)

I was going to cancel my subscription to The London Review of Books, but I've since decided otherwise. I hope motherhood won't be an excuse to just give up being challenged, and I certainly won't have to read the whole of every issue. But the articles that interest me are just so interesting, and I learn so much from them. I will be cutting down on the number of periodicals that come into our house though, which probably would be a good idea anyway.

Anyone who has ever had a baby is probably by now hysterical with laughter at my naivete, but let me tell you that whenever I'm told something isn't possible, I tend to get it done. My mother says that babies sleep a lot. If I remember correctly, Alice Munro has said something much the same, so I believe it. I am also determined to master nursing and reading, which can't be impossible as I've already taught myself to floss and read, and knit and read, so this is just another challenge. But I will try to keep an open mind and my expectations only moderately high.

If by the end of the summer, I've read Kate Christensen's new novel at all, I'll consider myself not too far off track.

Being Taken Places

Oh, how books do take us places. After reading Francine Prose's Goldengrove last week, I absolutely had to watch the movie Vertigo. Which wasn't a particularly good or convincing film all around, but there was something about it, how it came by its filmishness absolutely brilliantly, and was so thrilling to watch. How the movie and Prose's novel informed one another; I absolutely loved it.

And then I finished reading Owen Meany, which became far less plodding halfway through. And yes, I understand that some of the plodding was a narrative device, but I think some of it could have been fixed by an editor. Still, I remembered why I'd loved it, which had been the very point.

Then onward to The Long Secret by Louise Fitzhugh, the sequel to Harriet the Spy. And I'll say this-- I think Louise Fitzhugh is one of the best writers I've ever read, ever. Out of children's lit. and lit. the world over. I loved The Long Secret when I was young, and I could see why upon rereading-- I was just as baffled and fascinated as I would have been the first time around, and not every kids book reread can do that twice. In both of her books I've read, Fitzhugh captures the awfulness and inexplicableness that is real life in a way I can only compare to Grace Paley (class differences of their characters aside, of course). In no way watered down at all, Fitzhugh renders that reality palatable for children, which is truly amazing. This is the kind of literature children deserve...

And how strange here to see the number of parallels between The Long Secret and A Prayer for Owen Meany-- religious fanaticism, grandmothers, bad parenting, coming of age, summertimes etc. etc.-- which would have gone unnoticed had I been reading in any other direction.

Schedules Amok

Schedules are all running strangely of late, because we have a house guest, because she arrived in the middle of the night Sunday night, because we keep going out for meals with her and feel as though we're on vacation too. I'm currently rereading A Prayer for Owen Meany and just not getting into it. I always loved John Irving, but I've not read him for years, and I feel I may have lost the habit. It's also looong and I am eager to get through it in order to reach my final reread (The Long Secret), and then begin to tackle the wonderful stack of unread books on my shelf that have been gathering there since the end of June.

And so I've made no time for writing these last few days (here or anywhere) and consequently we'll all have to make due to with links. Oh, like Lizzie Skurnick revisits Flowers in the Attic. Nigel Beale refuses the Refuses. Laurel Snyder interviewed at Baby Got Books (and I'll be reading her book v.v. soon). Why postscripts still matter in the digital age. Rebecca Rosenblum is a Reader Reading (and now she's got her own Facebook group too).

Whatever I write reflects

"...But since I am neither a camera nor much given to writing pieces which do not interest me, whatever I write reflects, sometimes gratuitously, how I feel." --Joan Didion, "A Preface" to Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Rereading Late Nights

I just finished rereading Late Nights on Air, the novel that stole my heart last September. Back then I was reading it outside one afternoon when it started raining, and the book got wet, but I could not find the drop-splattered page this time. I kept expecting the book to get rained on this time, but the clouds kept holding off until I was safely indoors. Anyway, I tried to read it more critically, to reflect on the many different arguments I've heard about the book since then-- for its worth and otherwise. But I really couldn't help it, slipping right back into the same sweet dream that held me as I read it the first time, as easy as a paddle dip into a glass-calm lake.

I love this book, and I've decided I love its shape more than anything. The paddle dipping almost right, because it's about water, or I suppose the way that water makes a shape inside whatever vessel is holding it-- so absolutely fluid, yet contained. But here contained without a container even, molecules just suspended. That the chapters aren't numbered, for example, and their construction is not consistent. This is the only novel I've ever read whose lack of quotation marks for speech seemed to matter, that lack of containment, and yet held. The lack of division between speech, narration, inner thoughts and the voice in each of the characters' heads (which is different than their inner thoughts, of course). Utter calm, throughout, or maybe I'm just feeling mellow for once in my life, but it's the book, I think. As subtle and pointed as a name like "Gwen", how it slips from your lips. The word "slip" too, it's the same. Dipping paddles, quiet speed.

On finding math in my book

It's amazing, rereading, how it takes you back in time. Providing intimate encounters, so unexpected, with the yous you used to be. For example, yesterday I opened my copy of The Stone Angel for the first time since I read it in my grade twelve English class. First, on the first page is written in my (still) best friend's hand: "I hate this book because I can't read it because I am illiterate," ascribed to me, which must have been funny once. (What is funny, of course, is that illiterate was spelled wrong.) And then how about the trigonometry on the inside cover?? At least I think it's trigonometry, and the most remarkable thing about it is that it's my handwriting! That once upon a time that gibberish meant anything at all to me, and I struggled over it, slaved over it, vandalized my very own paperbacks with it (and for naught, I think I see now considering I don't even know what it is. Though did anybody even pretend that trigonometry was going to be useful?). What a strange life I must have lived then, and no wonder I sort of missed the point of the book, and we'll just add this to the exponentially ever-growing list of reasons why I'm glad I get to be an adult now.

Rereading Emily of New Moon

I reread Emily of New Moon this weekend, still riding the wave of recent L.M. Montgomery mania (which Steph at Crooked House rounds up here). I was surprised (but then not overly) to discover that my paperback copy was actually stolen goods, my then-school library's ownership stamped on the inside cover, and with no evidence of a "discard".

I don't remember how old I was when I first encountered Emily, but she never entranced me the way that Anne did. I do remember enjoying the books, but also how difficult I found them, and I could never quite explain why, and Emily-lovers never really understood what I meant, but I see it now. First being that I read all of Montgomery's books really young, and any of my understanding of Anne of Green Gables was probably due to having watched the Kevin Sullivan film, which came out when I was six. There was never an Emily movie, and so I was unfamiliar with the story. (This is interesting also to consider how the cinematic Anne influenced my impressions of that novel, considering how different it was to read Emily without such pictures in my mind).

That I had no "template" for understanding Emily might read a bit strangely, considering this story of an incorrigible orphan girl in PEI with romantic dreams and literary leanings, who is sent to live with bachelor/spinster strangers and changes their lives, investing a lonely old house with the heart it had lost, and bewitching every single person in town. That the novel is so remarkably like Anne, however, only shows Montgomery's progression as a novelist between 1908 and 1923 (nine books later). Emily is a longer book, her character drawn with so much more detail, we get inside her head the way we never really did with Anne, her perspective maintained throughout the text. Her own progression is less a series of scrapes and lessons learned. She has not Anne's fiery temper-- her own outbursts are usually in protest to some injustice instead. She has a certain steadiness uncanny for a child. Emily grows up, but she never changes, she never relents.

This depth of character would have been what tripped me up back when I first read this book. The complicated nature of the others too-- I remember being confused by Mr. Carpenter, who tormented the students who had potential in order to draw it further from them, and their ambivalent feelings towards him, and how I couldn't comprehend it. Though I remember finding Dean Priest's feelings for Emily a bit creepy, and I still do. Class issues-- what it meant that Perry came from a place called "Stovepipe Town" and I remembering picturing a village full of men wearing top hats.

This time around, the book was a pleasure, to discover what I'd been missing. I liked the novel's engagement with the wider world-- stories of immigration, with history. As with Anne, I loved Emily's bookishness, her passion for writing and how she'd have to do it anyway even if she'd never make a penny. The wise advice that she is given:

"If at thirteen you can write ten good lines, at twenty you'll write ten times ten-- if the gods are kind. Stop messing over months, though-- and don't imagine you're a genius either, if you have written ten decent lines. I think there's something trying to speak through you-- but you'll have to make yourself a fit instrument for it. You've got to work hard and sacrifice-- by gad, girl, you've chosen a jealous goddess."

So much can slip on by

I'm now rereading Joan Didion's Where I Was From, which is a very different book from the one I first encountered last May. Partly because I've visited California since then, and therefore have a more concrete image of what she describes. Which is not to say Didion's descriptions are inadequate, but rather now I see something different. In addition, I just finished Sharon Butala's The Garden of Eden, which has provided Didion's consideration of California agriculture-culture with a context. I've also found that Joan Didion is always worth a trip back to, for she is so subtle that much can slip on by.

Good things on the web of late: I also thought Feist singing "One Two Three Four" on Sesame Street was truly lovely, and will link to Carl Wilson's post about this because it contains some other vintage Sesame Street counting hits. My new favourite website is Fernham, by Woolf scholar Anne E. Fernald. Writer Margo Rabb's struggles upon discovering she'd written a YA book, and Laurel Snyder understands.

Chaos Continues

Bibliochaos continues-- the house is in shambles, and I'm covered in paint. Luckily so are the bookshelves (paint-covered, that is), and they'll get a second coat tomorrow, and it's not so unreasonable to assume things will be back to normal by Thursday. Meaning that I will be able to find time to post a rave review of Marilyn Robinson's Home, among other things. I've just finished rereading Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays-- I read it wrong the first time, and am glad I came back to find out just how wonderful it is.

Rereading Unless

"There you have it: stillness and power, sadness and recognition, contradictions and irrationality. Almost, you might say, the materials of a serious book." --Carol Shields, Unless (from the last page).

I think this may be the sixth or seventh time I've reread Unless, and it was new to me all over again. This time because I read it in light of Carol Shields' interview "Ideas of Goodness" from Eleanor Wachtel's book Random Illuminations: Conversations with Carol Shields, which I received for Christmas this year. To gain insight into Shields' own intentions with her book, her understanding of it. "I like to think of this book of these four little legs: this idea of mothers and children; the idea of writers and readers...; I wanted to talk about goodness; and then I wanted to talk about men and women-- this gender issue, which interests me so much and has actually be a part of every book I've written. I think I'm always writing about this."

Four legs indeed-- as a result of the interview, I started noticing the chairs scattered throughout the text. The importance of sitting, being seated, rest. I'd never paid enough attention to this. The tricky thing about a book on many legs-- just focusing on one of them, and assuming that's all. And this book is tricky in particular-- the story contradicting the themes, encompassing so many ideas. This is not a book that puts everything neatly in place. Which is part of the reason there is so much to discover, and I look forward to doing so year after year.

I was also thinking about the idea of what fiction is supposed to do. To challenge my world view, rather than reflecting it right back at me, and whatnot. When reflection is what Unless does, it does. It is reassurance, the articulation of my strongest feelings, but I've decided that I've entitled to this. Because, you see, the world itself doesn't reflect my world view-- the very point of Unless (or one of its many very points). And so when fiction can, at the very least, I will take solace where I find it.

Rereading Anne of Green Gables

The first time I encountered Anne in print was in an abridged version of the story at the beginning of my Anne of Green Gables colouring book. I first read the novel when I saw seven or eight, my understanding of which was greatly influenced by the film. My Anne was always Megan Follows, Marilla Colleen Dewhurst, etc. Try as I might, these associations refuse to be shed. Which is not such a bad thing.

The last time I read Anne of Green Gables was seven or eight years ago, the first time as an adult, and I read my wonderful annotated edition. I remember finding the annotations interesting, though I can't remember any of them now. I do remember being struck by the novel's humour. As a child I'd taken it all as sincerely as Anne did, but now I could see that much of the book was really quite funny.

This time rereading Anne of Green Gables, I went back to my old novel. It has become quite a treasure, though the dust-jacket is gone (I hated dust-jackets when I was little, how they'd get torn and ratty, and I used to throw them away). I wish I could remember what the cover had looked like. My edition is a reprint of the very first edition, old style fonts and textual decos, illustrations by Hilton Hassell with a line of text underneath each on. On the inside cover is inscribed, "To Kerry Lea, From Grandma and Grandpa, Xmas 1986". Note that from my grandparents, I would go on to receive hardback copies of Anne of Avonlea and Anne of the Island for my birthday and Christmas 1987. In 1988, the whole rest of the series arrives from them, albeit in paperback. Perhaps the most long-lasting gifts I'll ever receive. What treasures now...

Kate Sutherland has been rereading Anne, celebrating her centennial (for indeed she turned 100 years in June). She's been part of the group Blogging Anne of Green Gables, sharing rereadings and providing some fascinating insights.

Certainly Anne is a fine book for revisiting. Rereading is an absolute joy, and like any book worth a trip back to, it's amazing how much the perspective changes. The mark of any good book, such richness, and multiple layers readers can reveal for themselves as time goes on. As most young readers do, I identified with Anne, in all earnestness I wanted to be her. Because of her triumphs, I think, in the face of all adversity. I think all awkward little girls (which is most little girls) want to believe that triumph is possible. They're sold on Anne's version of romance, of her poetry, of the wilds of her imagination, just as her schoolmates are at the Avonlea school. How she casts a spell on the whole world.

Now I see though, rereading, that though Anne is the impetus, her story is about how that very spell changes Marilla Cuthbert. How Marilla realizes her true self through this bewitching orphan girl. "It almost seemed to her that [her] secret, unmuttered, critical thoughts had suddenly taken visible and accusing shape and form in the person of this outspoken morsel of neglected humanity." How from the moment she encounters Anne, she is biting back smiles, swallowing her "reprehensible desire to laugh". Until the end of the novel, when we find her in explosive fits of laughter, or when Matthew discovers her having a good cry. She learns to feel, to be, and to love. She is a wonderful, rich character, more than I'd ever thought to give her credit for.

I was also struck by the bookishness of Anne. Literary references scattered throughout the text, Anne's quoting poetry, but it's not just Anne. I'd always thought Diana Berry was a bit bland in comparison to her bosom friend, and so I was surprised to first encounter her as follows: "Diana was sitting on the sofa, reading a book which she dropped when the callers entered." Her mother instructs her, "Diana, you might take Anne out into the garden and show her your flowers. It will be better for you than straining your eyes over that book. She reads entirely too much... and I can't prevent her... She's always poring over a book. I'm glad she has the prospect of a playmate-- perhaps it will take her more out of doors."

The little girls of Avonlea read with fervour, exchange novels like I did stickers at their age. They're all variable types, none of them quite like Anne, but the bookishness is a common denominator I found fascinating.

Summer Rereading Project

As usual, I'll be rereading plenty during July and August, and I've written more about that project over at the Descant blog.

Expanding the possibilities

I was very interested to read "Women Behaving Boldly", Sarah Liss's argument that Sex and the City's female archetypes might have as their origin those of Alcott's Little Women. I've not read Little Women for years and years, and I'm not sure that what I did read wasn't abridged anyway, nevertheless, I'll be (re?)reading the novel this summer. Liss writes, "Louisa May Alcott ’s proto-feminist tome has been a rite of passage for generations... [T]he March girls were complex and flawed, and they helped shape my understanding of the many facets of femininity." As I reread, I'll keep her ideas in mind.

A reader takes issue with Liss, however: "Have you actually read Little Women?" Claiming that Little Women didn't celebrate feminist ideals, but rather quashed them. That Jo March was never accepted for her independent spirit, and those around her tried to tame her. Which might be right, I don't remember now. But I suspect otherwise, for when I look back to impressions of Little Women, Jo's spirit is all that I really remember. All attempts towards taming aside, Jo is Little Women (except for my impressions where Beth stands out, but they are only because she died).

I'd always associated Little Women with another female archetype-dependent television show, however, which was The Facts of Life. When I was seven and watched too much television, I came across an ad for Little Women in the back of another novel, read its plot synopsis, and figured these two quartets featuring girls named Jo must be intrinsically linked. It was only this chance to discover further adventures of a girl called Jo, I think, that led me to Little Women in the first place.

They were indeed a bit interchangeable, these Jo's, except that one had sold her hair, and the other cultivated hers into an elaborate mullet. Both of them were everybody's favourites though, and I can't help but think I'm not the only one who found both of them integral to an understanding of self during these formative years. That there were alternatives to the kinds of girls we were supposed to be, expanding the possibilities to encompass most anything.

The Octopus by Jennica Harper

I used to have this sticker with a picture of a boy and a bear standing on the top of Planet Earth, set against a black starry sky and the bear was pointing up. The words coming out of his mouth said, "Look up there." The image to me is the definition of "wonder", and it kept occurring to me as I reread Jennica Harper's book The Octopus yet again.

Wondrous things dominate this collection: prairie skies, cinema, rocket ships, spacemen, music, snowstorm, beaches, breasts, mothers, and extraterrestrial life. Some of these things ordinary but made new through widened eyes. From "Cinema Paradiso": "Only a true believer/ sits on the edge of her seat at the movies/ like they do in the movies./ I am such a believer."

In the long poem "The Octopus", this wonder is questioned, as two former lovers have the same conversations they've always had. "Something we could not let go:/ all the time spent, the conversations/ run and rerun, we didn't think we would/ have the strength to have them/ with another person." The other love who sees such wonder as self-indulgent, who "can't condone the reckless hope/ of finding some other life out there." He points elsewhere instead: "If Sagan and his crew really wanted an alien,/ you say, they would look to the octopus..." He is "afraid all this probing/ will have been a waste."

But to our narrator, the wonder has been enough, and so too the wondering: "the girl on the beach... but is it a waste that I got to dream her?" Pointing up, and wondering what is out there in the universe, asking where did we come from and where are we going. Questions that apply just as much to outer space as to our own histories; the secret to our origins might lie in the stars, but we seek the same answers in our mothers, our families, in the world all around us. In this context everything is worth examining; indeed a praying mantis is a "tiny robot", we are made up of our elements. And then we can dare to "admit we're not the only subject/ and can sometimes be the searcher, the verb".

Harper writes, "All of this talk is just talk./ The truth is, we will never know/ our own future, not even/our own past". The talk, however, and all the wondering, and the poetry-- all this stand as evidence, as an arsenal against empty claims of nothingness. Making it certain: "We Are Here."