Cynthia Robinson > Recent Status Updates

Can't really put a page count on here, because I am flipping back and forth as I tend to do with poetry collections, but can say I am particularly loving reacquainting myself with the Practical Cats!!

She's not disappointing me. She never disappoints me. She is both pitiless and gentle with middle age. And, of course, hilarious.

This book has grown on me despite the somewhat stock characters. The political context is fascinating--Barcelona in the 1930s... And while the romance aspect of it is a little bit of a guilty pleasure, well, I was threatening to DNF it for awhile, and that threat has gone out the window. I will definitely be finishing! The 1-dimensional male characters are perhaps the ones to which I object the most. But on I read.

I am a temporary poetry nerd. I am trying to finish a draft of novel #2 fit for my agent's eyes by 15 October, and am incapable of ingesting prose except in limited quantities. So finding new poets, and, in this case, revisiting old favorites! And happy to find the cat poems as delicious as ever and Prufrock still pretty effing great.

These are some of the most beautiful poems in existence. From any period, from any place, in any language. Michael Sells translates like a dream (my Arabic is nowhere near as good as his, but it is up to reading the original, and I can testify!). Impossible love, beautiful for that very reason. My kind, these are my peeps! Did I mention I live alone?

these are such little gems. I love Molly Giles. Reading her makes me happy, even when her characters make me cry.

Honored to say that the editor is a friend of mine. Not putting a page number because that isn't how you read poetry. Though, I suppose, you could, with this book, organized as it is into four sections, "Morning," "Day," "Evening" and "Night." Truly kaleidoscopic range of cultures and languages in translation; decades; perspectives. Many of the translations--from a myriad of languages--by my friend, the editor.

Molly Giles has been a favorite of mine ever since the first time I heard a story of hers read on NPR's selective shorts. Adept at finding the absurd in the heartbreaking, and vice-versa. Some writers I read because there's something in their prose that speaks to mine and helps me refine. Others I read for sheer pleasure--nothing to do with what I aspire to as a writer, but consummate genius at what she does.

Clearly going very slowly on this one. Partly because I'm so struck, this read, by the fragility of Clarissa. I feel the war so much more, all around her, between the lines, in the jumpiness of both women in the flower shop when the loud noise interrupts their reverie. Intro material in this edition is excellent, sends me down one rabbit hole after another (Shelley's "Adonais," The Green Bough...).

I read slowly because I write. Arrgh. On this read (this, I think, is my third), I'm struck by the permeable boundaries between character and world, past and present, the way Woolf manages to wander widely and wildly while in the heads of her characters (mostly Clarissa but nut always), and still keep the narrative under control. Shorter version of that: I am in awe.

Lerner's Adam Gordon is my current favorite among brilliant, yet unlikable, characters.Lerner spares no one, especially following the 11-M bombing. All motives are suspect, all political declarations posturing. I know Madrid intimately so that's a double plus for me. I am digging this novel. It is disquieting. And I like that.

This book blows me away in a different way pretty much every time I pick it up. It's dense, concentrated. Intense. I can only take it in small doses. How can a book that is essentially an expression of nostalgia for an exercise in Bad, Bad Love (it starts with a scene bordering on S&M) be the one of the most profoundly sad things I've ever read?

Reading this at the same time I dip into Woolf's diaries and letters, and Alison Light's MRS. WOOLF AND HER SERVANTS. If you don't find simultaneous reads crazy-making, I highly recommend the combo. Sellers so deftly captures so much of the really complex sister relationship with so few, concentrated words. For the 'between the lines', see Light and the letters.

The voice of the main character--we're inside her head the entire time--is breathtaking. And seems like it's the whole world speaking to the whole world, while simultaneously rooted in (unable to break free from...?) the one, searing, damaged and damaging relationship, long past, that has marked her for life. And is in many ways more real than the life she's living. I'm just in awe of how Holland pulls this off...

Smart, challenging, stark stream-of-consciousness--the past lives within us, close to the surface, and this novel makes that clear.

such a tour-de-force of deep-inside-the-psyche language, reaching dark places and bright. Especially dark.

I'm having real trouble with this one. I think it needed a more assertive editor. So much backstory that could have been pruned. Heart in politically right place doth not a novel make.

Early days but loving it as I do all of her work. I had the enormous privilege of having a story of mine critiqued by Dana Johnson @ the Squaw Valley Writers Conference in 2013 and ever since have been even more of a fan girl (and that story got published so she's a critique goddess as well as a wonderfully incisive, funny, pointed writer, makes you stare hard at uncomfortable, and sometimes really funny, stuff).

in principle interesting premise, from cultural perspective w/which most USA-ers are likely to be unfamiliar. I want to like it, but am finding it over-written, overly lyrical with cliche'd characters and a whole lotta angst which feels...hate2use this word...unearned. Hope to change my mind!

Just passed the half-way point; still in love with this book.