Distance Learning (First Book) - Softcover

Sorby, Angela

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0932826628 ISBN 13: 9780932826626

Publisher: New Issues Poetry and Prose, 1998

Synopsis

Distance Learning is a brilliantly conceived and structured book that carries the reader on journeys through both space and time.

About this title

About the Author

ANGELA SORBY is associate professor of English at Marquette University. She is author of two books, Distance Learning and Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

It's 1970, the year before I learned to read. My mother's in lotus on an orange towel trying to breathe through her right

nostril [...] I know if it weren't for me my mother would levitate beyond the Cascade snow line and over the roof of the world, and she says that soon by murmuring shantih as a mantra she will end the war that's been everywhere, even inside of us, since I was born.

(p. 12)

...In American gothic novels the heriones aren't

really afraid of ghosts. No, they're afraid of ironing: the

board, the sheets and pillowcases, the flatness, the

Midwestern flatness.

(p. 15) The desire for the transcendent--the inner war--is unmasked as something more earthbound, with desire in various guises sometimes celebrated, sometimes experienced as loss and sometimes imaged as a cover-up for something deadlier. In a poem about taking a train called "The Empire Builder" from Chicago to Seattle, Sorby writes, The past is a closed drawer. Maybe there really were angels circling the Great Salt lake in Brigham Young's day, but their wings are snipped at the root and folded, private as underwear. [...] we'll push west to Seattle, to our house, to out bed in the red cedar basement, to our St. Francis night light burning with power from rivers full of dead salmon trapped by dams. St. Francis's feet and fingers flood the room with faux fire: this is how we live, with our bones in blood, at the end of the empire.

(pp. 74-75) [...] Some Salish say human and animal

bodies generate tiny twins who can enter a sleeping enemy's

house or tent, or ear, or open mouth, and kill them. I chew the bear slowly and picture my fifty year old father shrunk down to

age six, in Sarpsborg, Norway, being slipped his first chocolate ever by an occupying Nazi who later shot the schoolteacher during one winter when people were

stretching their flour with bark from trees. My dad bit down and reeled into

heaven. It was that kind of sweet.

(p. 64)

Edition details

• Publisher: New Issues Poetry and Prose
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0932826628
• ISBN 13: 9780932826626
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 77