because the les figues press rummage sale is extended, and because I am trying to empty the storage space before the 1st, more anxiety over getting rid of more books

I did get rid of more books than the two I mentioned here earlier.

tonight it occurs to me that since I acquired these books -- since I started seeing my own poetry published -- my circle has tightened considerably (ah, reflected in sales? dunno)

Silvia Curbelo is considerably better-awarded than I am, NEA, that Florida grant, Seaside, Atlantic, etc.; Cuban emigre (more a child of Cuban emigres born in cuba, not the US, technically, I guess)

The Secret History of Water (nice title) is the first book in Anhinga Press' Florida Poetry Series. The editor generously gave me this copy at AWP.

"The Secret Geography of Leaving," the poem I flipped to first, is a poem about a farmer, giving it an "Iowa City in the 80s" feel to me. It sort of unreliably flits between tired metaphors and tired similes ("the bed is still as a lake" -- doubly tired!), and there's a terrible couplet:


It's the last leg of a bad season.
He'd like to walk the feeling off.

Creeley says in the intro, essentially, that the poems are a contract/covenant/compact (he says "compact") between listening and telling. Seems nice.

The first poem is in the voice of a Cuban boat person.

Camera Lyrica by Amy Newman I started a review of, when I was trying to frame a book of reviews as "TURN OF THE MILLENNIUM." I have notes and bent page corners. I am a page corner bender and spine cracker. I bent "Travel Diary" and "A Note on the Type." On "Bringing Desire into the Fields" I wrote 'brings lyric/metaphor to a fictional narrative."

Winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award, this book / author is also better awarded than I am. She looks a lot like Cynthia Fox. The cover is Mark Tansey, who was really trendy in 1999.


Catherine O'Neill's The Dafodil Farmer is inscribed, not to me, but to an Ann in 1981.

Carole Simmons Oles' THE DEED is another sweet briar - associated book. I think I got both of these books at Book Soup. There's an epigraph from WINSCONSIN DEATH TRIP, which seems promising. The deed is the deed to the family burial plot. 1991 was a time when longer books might be held under 60 pages by teeny tiny font size.

A chapbook frm a CSUN undergrad who read in my reading series, VERY well-produced for that sort of thing, that time and place.

Riding Home by Helem Potrebenko, a sort of interesting Canadian poet -- I've had a hard time keeping this book, though. I think I got it too cheap or something. There's a cool diagram.

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