Susan Wilson

The Bad Wife Handbook

admin — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 11:03:00 +0000

If in these modern times women had to hide potentially influential books from their husbands and others around them, The Bad Wife Handbook would be included among the silent list traded through some secret alley passage. Imagine pages of poetry and short prose ripped out then stuck inside of the bible so as not to draw attention or suspicion.

The Bad Wife Handbook is full of poetry that trips into the wholeness of married life - through the difficulties of monogamy, writing, children, and all the compromises made along the way. The poems express both emotional success and emotional repression bled out through words and ideas, like the sea and the universe. It is the honest truth of the bad against the good in life - or sometimes the other way around.

The collection, hidden in a pale blue book with a photographed of a wrinkled index card on its cover, tells us that marriage is impossible - the husband a beautiful creature you can’t, and sometimes don’t want to, escape. Children are desperate life drainers who use and take, yet are and always will be the best things ever produced from your body or mind. It journeys through sadness, love, and all that could happen in between.

I can’t say I would recommend this book to every woman I know. It may scare them off to one of the lesbian clubs that a good chunk of my friends already frequent. I can say that any woman in a long-term, committed, heterosexual relationship should read Rachel Zucker’s words. Knowing that her feelings are shared by others makes a girl realize that no matter how alone the compromises can make you feel, you are never really alone, and sometimes, giving in can make you the happiest you will ever need to be.

Written by: Susan Wilson, June 18th 2008

Reading the Remove of Literature

admin — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 19:45:00 +0000

By Nick Thurston

Printed Matter

This book throws readers for a loop. It is a book about the absence of literature, whose introduction one shouldn’t skip for fear of losing the point of the book completely. Originally, it started out as an edition of Maurice Blanchot’s L’Espace litteraire. However, not a line of the original text remains; in its place stands random empty underlines and otherwise blank gaps where the text should be. The margins are full of notes and questions relating to the original work. In Thurston’s own words: “In a way the work shadows the words… in the presence of the absence means a sense of someone is always constructing the present.”

This book is about the process of reading and how an author makes a person think. We are always trying to know what the authors of any books we read felt, experienced, dreamed of and if what we understood and took away from the text is what the author truly intended for us to grasp. Reading the Remove of Literature proves this with notes like “The poem is literature but is literature always a poem?” and “Writing is the process of dying constantly” or even “Present designates the terms past + future.”

After reading this book, I feel the urge to grab a notebook and construct the flow of thoughts, images and ideas in my head left over after every book I have ever read. The process of reading it, however, was mildly frustrating because I wanted to know what the original text was that the author constantly referred to. Then I read another line of notation in the book: “Impatience will only lead you to the image of the goal, not the goal.” I wondered if my anticipation and frustration is what Thurston intended.

Written by: Susan Wilson, July 16th 2007

You Leave Me Here

admin — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 23:58:00 +0000

By Kelly Greene

Kelly Greene’s music sounds like a mix between a lot of new country and a little singer/songwriter rock, like Sheryl Crow, mixed with a dash of influence from the Cardigans. It is upbeat, toe tapping and, at some points, the flow of the music makes you want to sing along without knowing the words.

Although one must give her (and all other singer/songwriters) credit for writing her own music and lyrics with this album, it sounds a bit repetitive. All of the lyrics cover the exact same subject. For example, the chorus for the song "I Guess I Like the Abuse" reads, “I guess I like the abuse/Well I must ‘cause I don’t fight/I guess I like being used/‘Cause I keep it all inside/And I just make an excuse/For the way you hold me down.” Ten tracks about how love is not real. The lyrics read a little like poetry set to a beat, and each song ends with a uniform bridge.

If you can get past the repetitive lyrics, and don’t mind that the music sounds basically the same on every track, the CD is honestly enjoyable. Kelly Greenw possesses a pretty yet powerful singing voice that draws in the listener and makes you want to hear what she has to say. Comfort can be found in her lyrics. They express an emotion that many women share. When you put your heart into something, or someone, and it fails, breaking your soul to bits, this album will let you know that you are not alone.

Written by: Susan Wilson, June 30th 2007

Legacy

admin — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 12:03:00 +0000

By Kerrigan Valentine

Creatrix Books

Legacy is a captivating book both sour and sweet. The placement of women puts an ugly taste in readers’ mouths, forcing a need to step back and savor just how decent we live. Sweetness comes in the form of poisonous flowers and a well needed rebellion.

The opening line “My mother died before I was born,” followed by an overwhelming “She was fifteen when I was born, the first in a long line of unwelcome daughters,” already expresses the strict starved environment Shannon lives within. In the town village of Legacy this is the case with all child bearing women. Women are taught to be wives, birthed for nothing more than to have more children, preferably boys. It is a practice dulling sugar-filled eyes, destroying the spirit of the women who once were dreaming children playing in fields, demoted the night of marriage to be viewed as nothing more than a homemaker, only finding beauty in the flowers she is allowed to plant in the spring.

Shannon Wrightsdaughter finds herself on the verge of this inevitable situation holding her newborn sister and telling the others that their mother has died. Forced from home to learn the wifely arts she sought to avoid, she soon finds herself faced with the reality that she will be married of to a man who will never love her and will only beat her until he has destroyed every ounce of spirit she owns. Shannon decides to run off with her infant sister only to be found, near death, by a clan of warrior women known as the Ilari. The Ilari take them in as their own, renaming her Shannon Tresdaughter, in honor of her mother. In the Ilari camp she learns that the monsters the men of her village fight year after year are really clans of women fighting for freedom. Every year a peace treaty is offered and denied by the men who relish in the comfort of the power they have over women in their society. “It was not lack of courage or weak wills that made many of those women what they were. It was fear and ignorance of anything different.”

Valentine’s words are brash and to the point. She creates a tale through the eyes of a rebellious child that every woman, old and young, can relate to. It is action packed until the end, keeping the reader on edge, dreaming of it even after the book has ended and is laid to rest on a shelf or bedside table.

Written by: Susan Wilson, March 29th 2007