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Just in time for Valentine's Day,
the Guardian in London has
reviewed and raved about
The Secret Language of Sleep.
And, for the rest of the week,
you can buy it for $5!
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Reluctant Sestina.BY SHARON DOLIN
of things, though more of a tease to end when just start- ing. To get down on your knees for such a project? Better to read and lunch, put up your feet and wait in your chemise for the mail to come, forget all other burdens, reasons, strivings, tramp- le them. After failing to fail tramp off to a bookstore (your modern grail) in the middle of middle age you've come to this formal jail to forget what you might otherwise have start- ed. And in this line there now flail five dull feet. Don't derail your reader, instead project your voice, your mind, like an out-of-focus you project- ed on a screen, while rhymes as on a tramp- oline bounce from line to line on feet as unsteady as the half-blind taste of middle- brow readers. In a bind, Don't get me start- ed, you'll opine, as with repetends you sink into forget- fulness. But once you've gone this far, forget going back or giving up as your son shoots project- iles at you for fun that make you start up from your chair (he's already on the run), tramp into his getaway room, slip on a crayon in the middle of the floor, and spy under the bed a pair of feet sticking out. And is it cheating if I switch from feet to feat, from you to I? Would you, impatient reader, find forget- table (now that we've beaten the middle) if I slipped up on the project introduced mistakes that might tramp- le this already bumpy form so you'd be start- led? How many hyphenated words to start or end a line? Would you stamp your feet (at such a feat)? and walk away? A poem about nothing: no tramp, no dame or dude in distress except the poem to forget? Who wouldn't be bored by such a project? Perhaps you're undeterred by no middle in the middle. Now, let's both forget this project and trample under our feet what was never middle but ended at the start!
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