Posted on Slate.com, December 16, 2008:
BEST BOOKS OF 2008
Melinda Henneberger, contributor:
I want to put in a word for my friend Donna Trussell‘s new collection of poems, What’s Right About What’s Wrong. Each one is a compact little rock of Texas Gothic, thrown hard. (Think Flannery O’Connor in verse, with less God and more rodeo.) Even before Trussell was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2001—she got the call telling her to report for surgery while watching the Twin Towers fall—her work, as she says, “tended toward death, death, pet death, sex, love, death.” But fierce or yearning, I love these ghosts—like Miss Candace Mayes, who surrendered her place in the last lifeboat off the Titanic to a mother who died years later of guilt, in an asylum where “Her hands would climb the trellis. Her feet were never still.” Of a daughter never conceived who calls, “[G]ive me your darkest winter, it will be spring to me.” And of a poet read posthumously, who can’t help asking, “Who are you? What do you do? Tell me, is the sun out?’ “
