Word: skies
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...struggle of survival. The most deeply troubling and perhaps the best of the stories in the new collection, "People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water," tells of the way a family of cowboy brothers viciously castrate a severely crippled man: Proulx comments, "Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that." The reader should be grateful that Proulx does not often drop into this kind of openly reflective tone: she is at her best when carefully texturing rural life, when...
...limited geographical area and a limited range of settings, and which draw from the same source of tragedy, it is one of the strongest tributes to Proulx' craft that the human characters, and their various tragedies, remain discrete and distinct. Perhaps there is one common tension, the big sky pushing down with an almost unbearable weight, but each of the protagonists stands or falls alone...
Natural as the choice may have been, Norfleet chose to place her insects, which she ordered from a mail-order catalog akin to L.L. Bean, in a distinctly unnatural setting. She uses rocks, sand, wood and sky to create the environment for each photograph, augmented by the vivid colors she uses to highlight the insects and illuminate the sky...
...first image is titled "My People" and consists of a large grasshopper standing on top of a boulder with wings outstretched, gesturing to "his people" in front of a blazing red sky. Norfleet continues with more abrasive images, such as "The Expectation of Submission." In this photograph, smaller insects have become caught in a wall of straw while larger bugs hover menacingly above. The entire composition is anchored by an erie red moon placed in the center of the photograph...
...three insects flying kites. (The kites are also other insects, which suggests darker connotations to "having fun.") The tension throughout the book between terrestrial and aerial insects is successfully addressed in this photograph through the device of the kite's string, which acts as a unifying force between the sky and the sand...