A poet to keep an eye on

Joe Wilkins is fast becoming a favorite poet of mine. His prose ain’t bad, either.

What’s the difference between a bowl and a kidney dish?

I once wrote a story in which one of my main characters, a 13-year-old girl, wakes in her hospital room after surgery to discover that she has broken her femur so violently in so many places that metal plates and screws have been inserted into the bone to help it knit together. On hearing this news, she begins to gag – she is about to throw up. My second main character, a 28-year-old doctor with a backstory, searches around for “a bowl” for her to throw up in. (He does not find one, and cups his hands for her to throw up into; the gesture is meant to reveal his character.)

I’m currently reading Water for Elephants, and I read this line last night: “I turn as vomit explodes from my mouth. Someone is there with a kidney dish, but I overshoot…” Do you see how precise that is – kidney dish? The reader instantly pictures the curved stainless steel dish used in a hospital. The reader has a solid image in her head. A bowl? What is that? Tupperware? Glass? Something from the cafeteria? That – that precision, that detail and care, that research to get it right, that sharpening of every word – that is the difference between stories that stay inside the computer and stories that make their way in the world.

What’s the difference between a bowl and a kidney dish? All the difference in the world.

An ordinary day

I love these fairy-tale Swiss days, story book days with the mountains and the snow and the crackling blue sky so clear it hurts. Days when we go sledding and I realize that I’m sledding in the Swiss Alps. The Swiss Alps. And even after eight years, the wonder of it hits me all over again and I’m reminded of these lines from Jhumpa Lahiri:

“I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.”

Simply beyond my imagination.

More delicious words

Here’s another one from Chabon: “There is a small, decisive clink, a bit hollow, like false teeth clapping together.”

It’s not just the startling combination of words that make these images so great but the way they fit perfectly into the style and tone of the work. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a crime novel, gritty, dark, full of noir characters: in the scene from which the line above is taken, the room is full of down-and-outers who probably have – or need – false teeth. And here’s another: “A Disney shtetl, bright and clean as a freshly forged birth certificate.” This to describe a neighborhood that’s home to organized crime on the eve of “the Reversion” when a good many people might be wanting forged birth certificates. Even the image from my earlier post: as the novel progresses Landsman, a police detective, and his partner are indeed comrades in a probably doomed adventure.

At some point I stopped dog-earing my pages to mark such perfect lines because I was turning back every other corner.

Swooning over this simile

Listen to this line from The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon: “He checks behind the hot-water tanks, lashed to one another with straps of steel like comrades in a doomed adventure.”

Wow. Wow oh wow oh wow.