Your baby is the size of a sweet pea. Your baby is the size of a cherry. Your baby is the size of a single red leaf in early September. Your baby is the size of What if. The size of Please Lord. The size of a young lynx stretching. Heat lightning. A lava lamp. Your baby is the size of every dream you've ever had about being onstage and not knowing your lines. Your baby is the size of a can of Miller Lite. Apple-picking. Google. All of Google. Your baby is also the size of a googol, and also the size of the iridescence at a hummingbird's throat. Your baby is the size of a bulletproof nap mat. Cassiopeia on a cold night. The size of the 1.5-degree rise in ocean temps between 1901 and 2015. Your baby is the size of the lie you told your mother the night before Senior Skip Day, and also the size of the first time you saw a whale shark glide by, its gray heft filling the tank's window, and also the size of just the very best acorn. Your baby is the size of the Mona Lisa. The size of the Louvre. The size of that moment in "Levon" when the strings first kick in. Your baby is the size of a baby-sized pumpkin. A bright hibiscus. A door. Your baby is the size of the Gravitron, and your fear the first time you rode it that your heart might drop right through your body, and then your elation when it didn't, when the red vinyl panels rose and fell and you rose and fell with them.
"Eight years after Rich’s death, at 82, comes Hilary Holladay’s The Power of Adrienne Rich, which allows us to meet this prickly poet fresh and entire. It’s the first proper biography of her, and there’s a lot to unpack. This is a good story well-told."
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"Writing Devi’s poems into English—I guess I mostly believe that Benjamin was right: even the original poem is a ‘translation’ of an experience past language—made me a writer of poems nothing like the poems I myself wrote. They were poems of great despair, of great rage, emotions ordinarily thought of perhaps as ‘negative;’ certainly they were emotions and feelings that I myself was only just beginning to explore in my own work."
