6/30/2023 0 Comments Tracks by Louise Erdrich![]() One poem is titled “A Love Medicine.” Like her other work, many of the poems are monologues: people telling stories, remembering, painting images that flicker with color and light. ![]() ![]() One section of Jacklight is about the same kind of butcher shop where much of The Beet Queen takes place. ![]() When a thin woman dies and her friends struggle with her deadweight, it’s “as if death had entered and filled the marrows of her bones with sand.” A flowering tree in the night is “a scratch of light against the gray of everything else, tossed in a film of blossoms.”Įrdrich’s 1984 book of poetry, Jacklight, reveals the sources of her prose style, as well as the thematic origins of her novels. Her sentences move lyrically they’re carefully crafted and often breathtaking. Erdrich’s strength is not stylistic variety but a consistent, unique voice, attentive to the sounds and suggestions of words. But the second book is very similar to the first. Her second novel, The Beet Queen, has had a milder reception, not because it’s any less good on the contrary, it’s more polished, more securely structured than Love Medicine. When Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine appeared in 1984, it was greeted with enthusiastic, almost hyperbolic, critical praise and showered with half a dozen awards, including the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
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