Status Updates From Selected Poems 2: 1976 - 1986

margaret atwood has such a knack for rhythms and analogies. ugh i love this

Reading evocative poetry and being evoked by it

Five Poems For Grandmothers was stunning! Atwood is amazing!

Variation on the Word Sleep
« I would like to be the air/that inhabits you for a moment/only. I would like to be that unnoticed/& that necessary. »

"i can’t talk right now i’m doing hot girl shit"

the hot girl shit in question: reading and rereading ‘marrying the hangman’ until i go insane

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.

How else can you live but with the knowledge
of old lives continuing in fading
sepia blood under your feet?

"My friends, who are both women, tell me their stories, which cannot be believed and which are true. They are horror stories and they have not happened to me, they have not yet happened to me, they have happened to me but we are detached, we watch our unbelief with horror."

I read Selected Poems I over the past year, one poem nearly every night before bed, so the book was a permanent resident on my beside table. After I finished it and put it back on my shelf, the table didn’t look right and going to sleep without Margaret Atwood’s words didn’t feel right so I’m beyond excited to have this one on my bedside table now and ‘new’ poems to read each night :)

I already love “the woman who could not live with her faulty heart”, and I had to skip the dolls one because it was personifying dolls which is from my nightmares. But I am excited to continue reading this.

I have been reading Five poems For Grandmothers for three days now. My own grandmother has Alzheimer's and my mother is struggling to care for her. Atwood conveys my observations of her decline accurately. My heart broke reading this poem knowing just as my mother cares for her mother so must I care for her one day and watch her wither. I learned my sense duty from my mother. We show deep love through obligation