{ "item_title" : "The Long Surprise", "item_author" : [" Barbara Lau "], "item_description" : "Contest Judge X. J. Kennedy heralds Barbara Lau's The Long Surprise as full of unexpectedness . . . feeling and verve and a confident step onto the main stage of American poetry. Adds Eleanor Wilner, Here is a poet of candor, vigor and daylight vision, who loves without illusion. . . whose ear is unerring, and whose startlingly fresh images push up like 'wild mint . . . through sidewalks.' Posing questions about the making of art (Is chaos / counterpoint to art, or instead, / its tuning fork?), marriage (How little is enough?), faith, family, and selfhood (Where does she begin / and I end?), Lau explores how life announces itself at our uneasy turn of the century. Her poems witness both the horrific the loss of a child, the greed of the impoverished, the motives behind child prostitution and common pleasures so dense they sedate you.Women at the BathDegas got it right, sketching nudeswith their backs turned, faces down, absorbedin the tub's hot tonic. One thousand years of arrangedhips and breasts have not framed such disinterestas this. They do not gaze at youwith Olympia's mild contempt nor Bacchante'slonging: one leans forward, toweling dry her hair,one stoops to dampen her sponge, one methodicallyscrubs her raised right hip. You cannot tell if they arepretty, or spent, and the blurred patina of their fleshgives you no perch to stand on.Shifting foot to foot, you feel like a nuisance,a pubescent peeping Tom who might as well slipdown the drain with the dead skin.Women and water-small surprise,this broth of insurrection I brew,the baby fussing in her crib, the husbandhalf an hour away. I sink slowly,lids closed, limbs lax. The head grows cumbrousas a newbom's. The mind loses its compass.And like a sun-drunk turtle, I begin to float.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers2.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/1/88/151/535/1881515354_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "12.00", "online_price" : "12.00", "our_price" : "12.00", "club_price" : "12.00", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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