For those of you outside Nebraska reading this, the rain two nights ago was at the edge of a cooling front that left us in the mid-70s yesterday. It looks to be very nice for the next couple of days. September can get hot, too, but you can sense that the days of the heat index are numbered.
I'm having a hard time putting all the pieces together. My reading of my comps list has slowed as the amount of intellectual energy going into the new job has been high. Nevertheless, I've been moving through Komunyakaa's Pleasure Dome: New and Collected. It's an easy voice he's got going with a jazzy, splashy and slightly spongy rhythm behind the lines. The mostly narrative poems run between confession and persona, race and sex. If you want a primer on African-American ambivalence about nature, here's the place to start. He has landscapes both urban and rural, and inhabits both with a kind of wary swagger. I'm still not sure if I like the poems or not, but they go quick, and I'm never afraid to lift the book to my lap and click open a pen.
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