Texas School Book Depository

by Hankla, Cathryn

• ISBN13: 9780807125410
• ISBN10: 0807125415
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-04-01
• Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr

Summary

Humorous, quirky, and spiritually meditative by turns, Cathryn Hankla's prose poems move by associative leaps and take their inspirations from cultural and personal icons. A shadow narrative moors the collection in the perspective of a woman who survives a difficult childhood to eventually comprehend the paradoxes of adult life and whose journeys into her heritage bring her to a fuller realization of her place in the world. Travels to Prague and Paris, allusions to literary, spiritual, artistic, and political figures, local and familial lore -- all become ready touchstones for the revelation of feeling and reevaluations of identity and the nature of freedom.

While recognizing the danger in exploration, Hankla takes pleasure in questioning the status quo and takes issue with those who sidestep emotional or intellectual adversities by affecting apathy. In the tide poem, the huge cache of the Louvre is searched, not for the famed Mona Lisa or Egyptian antiquities, but in a metaphorical quest for something now forever lost -- a nation's collective naivete, destro

Author Biography

Cathryn Hankla is professor of English at Hollins University.

Table of Contents

Did the Souls Go	1	(1)
Introduction	2	(1)
Great Blue	3	(1)
Irrelevant Violet	4	(1)
Self-Reflection	5	(1)
The Place	6	(1)
She Falls	7	(1)
Fate	8	(1)
Texas School Book Depository	9	(1)
Man Marking	10	(1)
The Unexpected	11	(1)
Eggs	12	(1)
Baby	13	(1)
Thinking to Scale	14	(1)
Hunger Moon	15	(1)
Civil Rights	16	(1)
Abracadabra	17	(1)
Dreaming of Turtles	18	(1)
Drinking Becherovka	19	(1)
Red Beets, Steaming	20	(1)
God Attack	21	(1)
Monarchs	22	(1)
Reading Simone Weil at a Tender Age	23	(1)
Amelia	24	(1)
Baby, It's Cold Outside	25	(1)
Mid-Life Apologia	26	(1)
Neighborhood Buffalo	27	(1)
Kafka's WC	28	(1)
Renovation	29	(1)
Footsteps	30	(1)
Mont Sainte-Victoire of the Local	31	(1)
Plump	32	(1)
Memory Game	33	(1)
The Other Room	34	(1)
Jackie Is Dead	35	(1)
Starry Night	36	(1)
Ants	37	(1)
Sleeping Beauty	38	(1)
Afternoon	39	(1)
Description	40	(1)
Rilke's Basement	41	(1)
In the Valentines	42	(1)
Prague Blues	43	(1)
The Magic Telephone	44	(1)
Bronzed Memory	45	(1)
Dreaming of Prague	46	(1)
Pages Ago	47	(1)
Maps	48	(1)
Turn Something Inside Out	49	(1)
When the Telephone Was in the Fish Tank	50	(1)
Plastic Wrap in a Cavern	51	(1)
Dental Floss in the Getaway Car	52	(1)
Freedom	53