10-11 / 72
8
9
laurentian review
on social media
laurentian
Reviews
Other Books of Note
Lorrie Moore ’78
has issued a new
collection of short stories,
Bark
(Knopf, 2014), wherein her charac-
ters contend with midlife crises. “The
absurdities of their recklessness and
the burdens of their solitude have
only intensified with age,” wrote a
New York Magazine
interviewer in
February 2014. Moore teaches cre-
ative writing at Vanderbilt University.
She received an honorary doctorate
from St. Lawrence in 2004, and will
offer a reading on campus on April
23 (for details, go to
www.stlawu.
edu/english).
Jess Welch ’13
has self-published,
through Amazon, a young-adult
novel,
Polohani’s Pearl
(2014). Set in
an environment where war has been
raging for 80 years, it concerns a
pampered officer’s teenage daughter
who is kidnapped by the enemy
but is rescued as the enemy forces
overrun her hometown and begins
seeing a woman named Polohani in
her dreams. She “must find a way to
put her insecurities and her prejudice
aside in order to save everything she
has left,” according to the book’s
back-cover blurb.
—NSB
I can hardly offer a dispassionate evalu-
ation of the work. Right away I know
this poet can go anywhere in the world of
people who make things that matter. Not
just beauty, though there is always some
beauty dancing near a Boulay poem, but
intelligence of several kinds: Sensibility,
experience, intuition, imagi-
nation. And there’s emotional
intelligence as well: “Today
I rose in the wreck / but I
didn’t know what to keep //
the memory of what it left be-
hind: / you, small chair; you,
empty belly: // you, knock on
the dark door” (“Aubade with
Pericardium /and Visitor”).
India shows itself frequently.
Anyone who doubts the value
of “abroad” programs for
undergraduates might take a
stroll through the images that
frequent Boulay’s imagina-
tion: “When it rained, even
our shoes / turned green. The
fan whirred / except when
the power was out, / then we
read by candlelight under /
the mosquito net, or didn’t: /
I feared it going up / around
us, a fuzz of flame” (“Pal-
likoodam”). The book is get-
ting good reviews, providing
occasions for public readings,
and ushering Boulay into the next phase
of her writing career.
Keep it up, kid.
—Albert Glover
Piskor Professor English, Emeritus
Charlotte Boulay will offer a reading on
campus on March 5, as part of the
St. Lawrence Writers Series (for details,
go to
www.stlawu.edu/english).
Charlotte Boulay ’00 publishes first
collection of poetry
One of my unexpected pleasures since
retiring from classroom work in 2005
has been enjoying the accomplishments
of former students. When
Charlotte
Boulay ’00
called a few years ago to
tell me she had received an acceptance
letter from Paul Muldoon, then poetry
editor of the
New Yorker
(to date she is
the only St. Lawrence poet to find print
in that weekly of whom I am aware), I
celebrated. As I now celebrate, and would
invite the entire St. Lawrence community
to celebrate, the publication of her first
commercial book,
Foxes on the Trampoline
(Harper Collins, 2014).
#
SLUfamous
SHE asked, WE answered:
No More
turning a
blind eye.
—
Courtney Meyers '15
Laurentians speak up against domestic violence.
No More
ignorance.
—
Jake Hurlbut '15
Hannah Searle '15
brought the national
“No More”
campaign
to campus in November
to help continue raising
awareness about
domestic abuse
and
sexual assault
.