StefanieH

JD_Cunningham , 3 days ago to bookstodon group

"The book didn’t want anyone to know it was there. If it were destroyed, everyone who’d survived in the story would be gone too. There would be no one left to remember the ones who had died. The balance of the world goes horribly askew when a story is confiscated; it becomes a darker, more ominous place." -- from 'The Book Censor's Library' by Bothayna Al-Essa; trans. Ranya Abdeirahman, Sawad Hussain

#WednesdayBookQuote #reading #books #translation @bookstodon

JD_Cunningham , 22 days ago to bookstodon group

As usual, I'm late to the party, but now am about a third of the way through R.F. Kuang's 'Babel' and thoroughly enjoying the storytelling and how Kuang weaves in such things as British colonialism, the fascinating, dangerous complexities of language, the concentration of power and the fight against it, and so much more into a wonderfully re-imagined Oxford that is recognizable, yet entirely different.
#FridayReads #CurrentlyReading #books @bookstodon

JD_Cunningham , 1 month ago to poetry group

I watched the turquoise pastel
melt between your fingerpads;
how later you flayed

the waxen surface back
to the sunflower patch
of a forethought, your

instrument an upturned
brush, flaked to the grain -
the fusty sugar paper buckled.

You upended everything,
always careless of things:
finest sables splayed

under their own weight,
weeks forgotten - to emerge
gunged, from the silted

floor of a chemical jamjar.
I tidied, like a verger
or prefect, purging

with the stream from the oil-
fingered tap. Stop,
you said, printing

my elbow with a rusty index,
pointing past an ancient
meal's craquelured dish

to the oyster-crust
at the edge of an unscraped palette -
chewy rainbow, blistered jewels.
-- 'A Painting' by Sarah Howe
#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry

(Art credit: Bellesouth Studio)