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Laughing Sickness
Book by Kathleen Driskell
- GenresPoetry
68 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 26, 2012
Kathleen Driskell's book of poetry, Laughing Sickness, lured me to its pages because she is the founding director of the Kentucky Writers' Coalition and it was published by my hometown Louisville's Fleur-de-Lis Press. Flipping through this small volume to "Optometrist's Visit" completed the sale. She writes,
"it had been years since
in the dark she had been touched by
another man and at once the world
came again quick and dangerous and
she still felt her face
held in those warm hands,
her knees pressed tight
against his and she thought
even without her new glasses,
it was senseless to think, given
this new possibility, that a soft blur
could ever truly exist anywhere again"
Driskell fills her pages in Part One with the seemingly ordinary, only to morph each one into anything but--a trip to the optometrist, a police diver, a cup of red tea.
In Two, Driskell shares "Laughing Sickness" where ,"There is a new woman in our house. In the outstretched palm of her hand rest my pills." A sense of deja vu for some readers? Driskell will make the hair on the back of your neck stand up with the fear of familiarity and the anticipation that things are not quite what they usually seem.
I particularly warmed toward "Cardinal" and "Matrimony" in Three, but all of her images resonate. A treasure to flip through and find "a young girl lies secreted away on an old carpet that smells of thread tearing" while a house painter looks on. And in some cases, you, the reader, are the house painter.
"it had been years since
in the dark she had been touched by
another man and at once the world
came again quick and dangerous and
she still felt her face
held in those warm hands,
her knees pressed tight
against his and she thought
even without her new glasses,
it was senseless to think, given
this new possibility, that a soft blur
could ever truly exist anywhere again"
Driskell fills her pages in Part One with the seemingly ordinary, only to morph each one into anything but--a trip to the optometrist, a police diver, a cup of red tea.
In Two, Driskell shares "Laughing Sickness" where ,"There is a new woman in our house. In the outstretched palm of her hand rest my pills." A sense of deja vu for some readers? Driskell will make the hair on the back of your neck stand up with the fear of familiarity and the anticipation that things are not quite what they usually seem.
I particularly warmed toward "Cardinal" and "Matrimony" in Three, but all of her images resonate. A treasure to flip through and find "a young girl lies secreted away on an old carpet that smells of thread tearing" while a house painter looks on. And in some cases, you, the reader, are the house painter.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews