On Bobbie Louise Hawkins
Selected Prose of Bobbie Louise Hawkins
Edited by Barbara Henning
BlazeVOX Books, 2012
391 pages / $18 Buy from BlazeVOX or Amazon
&
Fifteen Poems
By Bobbie Louise Hawkins
Belladonna, 2012
51 pages / $12 Buy from Belladonna
Bobbie Louise Hawkins writes some enlivening good times prose. Her writing skirts the not so fine line between fiction and non-fiction. Often composed in the form of short vignettes and based on either a story she’s been told or off events she’s herself experienced, nothing Hawkins writes is ever just made up. It all more or less happened somewhere to somebody and that’s much of what’s so endlessly charming about her work. It matters. It sticks to your guts like a good meal should. This is necessary news about living:
One evening when Velma and I were kids and were playing in the half dark of the front porch it started to look as if there was some big fire in the far distance. The sky glowed red and the glow became larger until it took up half the sky in that direction. And in the wake of the colour rose an enormous full orange moon. Texas full moons have the gift of being seen the instant they surface.
Stand in a perfect half circle. The far line of the horizon is exactly horizontal. That line extends as far as you can see, left or right. Below that line is one colour, above it is another colour. You are standing on the exact line of it. Your feet are on the earth and your head is in the air. Roughly speaking you are a 90° vertical line. You are a definite addition to the landscape, that is you are holding down that piece of ground and you’re human.
(“From Abilene to Lubbock…”)
2 Comments
October 8th, 2012 / 12:00 pm
October 8th, 2012 / 12:00 pm