#sing to it

[words-and-coffee]

I remember thinking: There will never come a time when I will not be thinking of this. And I was right. And I was wrong

Amy Hempel, Sing to It

[unencumberedbylogic]

has passed .

[alternativebookmarking]

"I remember thinking: There will never come a time when I will not be thinking of this. And I was right. And I was wrong."

Amy Hempel, Sing to It

[lazyydaisyyy]

Amy Hempel, Sing to It

[zoe-bug]

The psychic is likely to tell me that I will fall in love. This what everyone thinks one wants to hear. But I don't want to fall in love in the sense that a psychic might mean it. I don't want a romance, if that is what she predicts. But love? Sure, keep it coming. In another form. Not a man, and not a woman. An animal, a place, or a cause. I would like to fall again with any and all of these.

“Cloudland” from Sing to It, Amy Hempel

[nprbooks]

Our critic Michael Schaub describes Amy Hempel as kind of the anti-Joyce Carol Oates: You have to wait and wait and wait and wait for new work. But, he says, her collection Sing to It -- her first book of new material in 14 years -- is profoundly worth the wait. Find his review here.

-- Petra

[danielriddlerodriguez]

THE ORPHAN LAMB --Amy Hempel

He carved the coat off the dead winter lamb, wiped her blood on his pants to keep a grip, circling first the hooves and cutting straight up each leg, then punching the skin loose from muscle and bone.

He tied the skin with twine over the body of the orphan lamb so the grieving ewe would know the scent and let the orphan lamb nurse.

Or so he said.

This was seduction. This was the story he told, of all the farm boy stories he might have told. he chose the one where brutality saves a life. He wanted me to feel, when he fitted his body over mine, that this was how I would go on, this was how I would be known.