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We Take Me Apart
by
Molly Gaudry (Goodreads Author)
Poetry. Nominated for the 2011 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. "Entwining the trance that is childhood around the hallucination that constitutes adulthood, Molly Gaudry's WE TAKE ME APART is a bewitching and carefully barbed tale. A cross between silence and a fairy tale, Gaudry's Beckettian narrative sews bright bits to near-faint whispers, slowly swaddling us in qu...more
100 pages
Published
January 1st 2010
by Mud Luscious Press
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This novella in free verse knocked my socks off. It's not often I wish I'd written something, but more than once reading this potent little book I found myself despairing that I would never write something like this. It charts the speaker's movement from childhood into adulthood, into and then out of a love relationship, her return home to take care of her mother as she wastes and then passes away, and then her adjustment to loss. Throughout there's a dreamy quality-- reinforced by a careful dis...more
the title 'we take me apart' suggests a revisionist approach to perhaps a 'veiled' autobiography
by that i mean she stitches her own life/perspective into the fairytales that she takes apart
a pastiche of familiar but powerful fragments
my favourite part:
in a different version it was not three beautiful maidens but Mother & you & me in this version
as in all versions
happiness was her hoped for ever after
then i came along & in this version happiness was her hoped for ever after for me
but...more
by that i mean she stitches her own life/perspective into the fairytales that she takes apart
a pastiche of familiar but powerful fragments
my favourite part:
in a different version it was not three beautiful maidens but Mother & you & me in this version
as in all versions
happiness was her hoped for ever after
then i came along & in this version happiness was her hoped for ever after for me
but...more
Another entry into the burgeoning no genre-genre which was maybe called Prose-poetry before but where current practitioners resist genre labels, the cauterization of being fit into a taxonomy. Whereas Edson's surrealist, mutating domestic spaces and inhabitants...Whereas Aase Berg's heavy metal clots of churning bodies in the fallout...Whereas Kim Gek Lin Short's book long transfiguring relationship narratives...Whereas Joyelle McSweeney gothic genre mashups...TWMA prosey style as lineated, empl...more
Molly Gaudry's free verse novella, We Take Me Apart, surprises and pulls the reader in new directions as she recounts the life of our narrator. Told in first person, it shifts to second at every mention of the man she loved.
It's a book about relationships, about what it means to be a daughter, what a mother can mean, and it attempts to answer or at least understand what love is between a man and a woman.
It's powerful and quick with language that bends and twists. The kind of words you can live...more
It's a book about relationships, about what it means to be a daughter, what a mother can mean, and it attempts to answer or at least understand what love is between a man and a woman.
It's powerful and quick with language that bends and twists. The kind of words you can live...more
In We Take Me Apart, a novella in verse, Molly Gaudry tells an old story in a new way. It’s about mothers and daughters and kitchens. It’s about cooking and cleaning. It’s about home —— leaving and staying. It’s about stitching and unstitching (to borrow a phrase from Yeats). The voice and form are utterly unique. The images are quickly rendered in precise language.
Listen to Molly read from We Take Me Apart at Apostrophe Cast: (http://www.apostrophecast.com/authors...)
Listen to Molly read from We Take Me Apart at Apostrophe Cast: (http://www.apostrophecast.com/authors...)
I enjoyed this the most when about halfway through I started reading it out loud, which made me appreciate the language, especially the call and response parts, all the more. Parts were also reminiscent of my favorite Virgina Woolf story "Kew Gardens" which I had also recently been reading. Although Gaudry's book is in verse, I think Woolf is an apt comparision.
"Story-wise, WTMA contains three characters: the protagonist daughter, her mother, & the daughter’s significant other. Though much of the book is in first person, it shifts to second when referring to the daughter’s love interest. Successful, too, is Gaudry’s adept use of voice, which changes as the main character grows older...."
Read the rest in the December 2009 issue of decomP .
Read the rest in the December 2009 issue of decomP .
Oct 26, 2009
Adam
added it
Molly Gaudry's writing always surprises me. I can't wait to see her words in book form.
Loved it. More, please.
The small size of this novella seems a bit misleading given the amount of beauty inside. I'm not sure what to call it, perhaps a novella in poem form, but it doesn't matter what to call it. The lines are almost chilling in how perfectly, how quickly, and with how few words such intense images are called up. The exact perfect words seem chosen with meticulous precision, exquisitely ordered. It really is a stunning book.
The language in this little book is superb. Molly takes great care of the language. It's beautiful. But the scope of the book...the entire project...is just like walking on a handsome treadmill. There are many delicate images, but laced together they form a null whole. I can tell Molly is well-trained in the business of writing as it's taught by academia. I gravitate away from that, away from constant symbolism. 3.2 stars.
Elegant and eloquent are the words that come to mind. WE TAKE ME APART is an excellent example of what can be achieved in the space between fiction and poesy.
Beautiful voice and arresting language to sink into. This is a book to be read slowly.
*We Take Me Apart* dazzles the senses and engages the emotions. With language that is both delicate and arresting and with a voice all her own, Gaudry knows how to hit readers square in the gut.
I loved this amazingly dense little book. Spooky at times in it's haunting domestic details. Sexy, too. This one sticks with you for a long time.
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Jan 20, 2010 09:26am