Word: poem
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...novel opens with some apparently random letters from Freud and an associate, then shifts to a 13-page poem that reads like a dream fugue of eroticism and premonitions of doom. A woman and a faceless lover fetch up at "a white lakeside hotel" and make love incessantly and imaginatively. Meanwhile, other guests drown when a pleasure boat on the lake goes down in a sudden high wind; a wing of the hotel burns to the ground, killing many others. The poem is followed by an expanded prose version of the same fantasy. This time the woman's lover...
...poem and its prose companion, it then turns out, have been given to Freud ,by Lisa Erdman, their author and his patient. She is suffering from i shortness of breath and debilitating pain in her left breast and left ovary. Conventional medical treatment circa 1919 has failed to cure her. Perhaps Freud's newfangled methods will help...
...abiding guilt it has created a code of self-protecting lies, including a sexual phantasmagoria about blacks that has resulted in everything from cheap jokes to lynchings. (In black novels, heroes fear the accusation of rape far more than that of murder.) Guilt has also created stereotypes. In a poem on the comic actor Willie Best, LeRoi Jones listed the unlaughable characteristics: "Lazy/ Frightened/ Thieving/ Very potent sexually/ Scars/ Generally inferior/ But natural rhythms." White America has also created itself-a world that, when depicted in a novel like William Melvin Kelley's dem (1967), comes off as pallid...
Mayer's script is a farrago of styles, all of them challenging, from the evil magician's bloated Miltonian opening speech to the Scholar Wu's delicate (and suitably alcoholic) Eastern lyricism in a poem called "Kite Fight," which he recites while being whipped. (The scene is stylized and relatively painless, the Scolar Wu seeming to leave his body far behind, the onlookers emitting the sound of the lash.) Our bodies are kites in a kite fight, he says--the kites a long...
...Tarnower's life itself be tarnished!" he shouted. "Don't say he died as a result of a homicidal rage, of some sordid affair. Restore the dignity of Dr. Tarnower, who himself died trying to save Jean Harris." He ended his impassioned plea by quoting a poem of Edna St. Vincent Millay: "I miss him in the weeping of the rain...