#plainwater

[thenervebible]

Plainwater, Anne Carson

[beguines]

Anne Carson, Plainwater

[sorrydetka]

helly is slow to trust, but loyal. helly can swim long distances.

severance (2022-) // plainwater: essays and poetry by anne carson

[dk-thrive]

You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.

― Anne Carson, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry (Vintage, 1995) (via Alive on All Channels)

[heartssarrow]

- Anne Carson - Plainwater

[giveherswords]

december reading, or: the body speaking back

december’s through-line is appetite—who gets to want, how wanting marks the body, and what happens when language has to carry desire, grief, hunger, and touch all at once. these books are (as I am) obsessed with bodies: breathing ones—starved, flooded, grieving, electric.

they ask the same question from different angles: what does it cost to be alive in a body that wants something it’s not supposed to want?

Bright Dead Things — Ada Limón

a book about grief that refuses to be quiet—poetry that moves through loss, love, sex, illness, and survival with a voice that is conversational but exacting. How To Triumph Like A Girl continues to be one of my favorites.

"Don't you want to believe it? Don't you want to lift my shirt and see the huge beating genius machine that thinks, no, it knows, it's going to come in first."

Plainwater — Anne Carson

not really a book: long-form essay into poetry. fragmented, demanding, deliberately unfinished—very Carson.

“Desire as round as peaches bloom in me all night, I no longer gather what falls.”

Indigo — Ellen Bass

Bass writes about lesbian sexuality, trauma, aging, tenderness, and survival with clarity and compassion. a poet and psychotherapist by training, she models how to write about sex and pain without spectacle. Getting into Bed on a December Night:

"When I slip beneath the quilt and fold into her warmth, I think we are like the pages of a love letter written thirty years ago that some aging god still reads each day and then tucks back into its envelope."

Appetite: Sex, Touch and Desire in Women with Anorexia — Melissa A. Fabello

a queer, feminist, trans-inclusive, research-driven reframing of anorexia that centers desire rather than its absence—showing how hunger, touch, sex, and control intertwine, and how restriction is often about regulating what and who the body is allowed to want. (cw: this is an academic text that discusses eating disorders and sexual violence.)

Crush — Richard Siken

violent, tender, obsessive. Siken captures queer male desire as something cinematic and dangerous, longing that tips into terror. he writes love like a disaster movie—beautiful, catastrophic, unforgettable. The Torn-Up Road:

“I want to tell you this story without having to confess anything, without having to say that I ran out into the street to prove something, that he didn’t love me, that I wanted to be possessed, thrown over, that I wanted to have the wounds nailed shut. I want to tell you this story without having to be in it.”

[the-family-of-all-things]

Extract - Plainwater - by Ann Carson

[someforbiddenparadise]

Humans in love are terrible. You see them come hungering at one another like prehistoric wolves, you see something struggling for life in between them like a root or a soul and it flares for a moment, then they smash it. The difference between them smashes the bones out. So delicate the bones.

Anne Carson, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry