Giselle,

I visited your blog tonight and enjoyed reading your poems. I see you are feeling your way into a very promising style of poetry that goes against the grain of most contemporary writing. I like that.

Your poetry has a candor and a strangeness and a floating quality that I like. The Floating World.

It sort of reminds me of Marguerite Duras but without the darker strains of erotic pathology which often inflect her writing.

Your writing looks right into many different types of vulnerability. Most contemporary poetry is terrified of vulnerability.

Duras too had a sort of innocence, and innocence and keen intelligence often marry to produce great writing.

I liked this part of this poem you wrote recently...



    the reason i knew i knew



i don't know anything about you.


i don't know about the way you laugh
the way you adapt your body into mine
when snuggling becomes mingling
and mingling becomes something.

when your somethings become nothing
and your nothing becomes the most
expensive thing in the world,
i stop and catch the breath at the side of the road.


i saw snowflakes lay flatbacked on the sidewalk last night
and i wondered if they were looking up
to the place where they came from,
and if they were yearning to return.

i showered and shuddered,
thinking of you,
being alone,
being together.

i stopped and stacked
9 pancakes together
and cut into them with the
butter knife.
that was all i wanted.

i listened to the tricky, tricky, tricky of your voice
and to the breath that your voice betrays.
i realized that shuddering lips
and stable eyes can mean the same thing.



I look forward to seeing your new poems as they appear at your blog.



(You can check out Giselle's blog by clicking on her avatar over to the right on this page.)