The Beautiful Librarians, Sean O’Brien
I’ll confess… I didn’t get it. I picked this fairly randomly from the library’s selection of poetry, because I had a reading bingo prompt for a poetry book, and I wanted to give something new a try. It’s been a while since I’ve read poetry, so I’ll admit I’m out of practice. Nonetheless, it was hard to follow these through to the end, to get past the images and clever rhymes and half-rhymes and structures to see what he was ever trying to say.
In the end, I’m not sure I ever actually got anything out of any of these, beyond some very brief sense-impressions (several of them disgusting). There were a few funny lines and a few images I liked (“the compass gathered like a rose/into its bud” — clever!)… but overall, it just wasn’t for me at all.
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