Donna Masini
Donna Masini es una poeta y novelista nacida en Brooklyn y vive en la ciudad de Nueva York.
Se graduó de Hunter College y la Universidad de Nueva York. Su trabajo se ocupa con frecuencia con la vida urbana y la clase trabajadora. Su primer libro de poemas, ese tipo de peligro, recibió el Premio de Barnard Mujeres poeta, elegido por Mona Van Duyn. Además, ha recibido un Fondo Nacional de las Artes de becas y la Fundación de Nueva York para las Artes de Grant.
El trabajo de Masini ha aparecido en América del Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, el Paris Review, Sra, KGB libro de poemas, Georgia Comentario, Parnassus, el Boulevard y lírico.
Masini Actualmente es profesor de la poesía como parte del programa MFA de CUNY Hunter College en Escritura Creativa. También ha sido profesor en la Universidad de Columbia y la Universidad de Nueva York
Se casó con Judd Tully en 1986. Vive en la ciudad de Nueva York. [3] En la actualidad trabaja en una nueva novela de la obsesión, el psicoanálisis y la clase.
Bibliografía
Poesía
Turning to Fiction: Poems . New York: WW Norton & Company. 2004. ISBN 978-0-393-05970-0 .
That Kind of Danger: Poems . Boston: Beacon Press. 1994. ISBN 978-0-8070-6823-6 .
Novelas
About Yvonne: A Novel . New York: WW Norton and Co. 1998.
Antologías
Billy Collins, ed. (2005). "Slowly". 180 more: extraordinary poems for every day . Random House, Inc. ISBN 978-0-8129-7296-2 .
Pamela Gemin, Paula Sergi, eds. (1999). Boomer girls: poems by women from the baby boom generation . University of Iowa Press. ISBN 978-0-87745-687-2 .
Despacio
Una vez vi a una serpiente comerse un conejo.
Cuarto grado, el reptilario del zoológico
el conejo duro, el hocico primero, arena pegada a su pelaje,
la cabeza apretada en las anchas
mandíbulas de la serpiente, la serpiente
tragándola por su larga garganta.
Toda garganta esa serpiente – no podía decir
dónde terminaba la garganta, dónde empezaba
el cuerpo. Recuerdo el recinto
de vidrio, cómo esa serpiente
se tomó su tiempo (todas las chicas se quejaban, gritaban
¿pero no estaban asombradas, fascinadas,
diciendo que no podíamos mirar pero mirábamos, no estábamos
atrapadas por eso, no estábamos
imaginando – qué estábamos imaginando?)
La srta. Peterson nos apuró a que avancen, chicas,
pero no nos podíamos mover. Era como si
un helecho se desplegara, la mano
del minutero se moviera por el reloj. No entendía por qué
la serpiente no se ahogaba, el conejo nunca
se movía, cómo las mandíbulas seguían abriéndose
más y más, llevándoselo adentro, tal y como
yo estoy tomando esto, despacio,
haciéndolo mío en mi cuerpo:
este dolor. Cuánto tarda
el cuerpo en darse cuenta.
Nunca vas a volver.
Versión de Tom Maver
SLOWLY
I watched a snake once, swallow a rabbit.
Fourth grade, the reptile zoo
the rabbit stiff, nose in, bits of litter stuck to its fur,
its head clenched in the wide
jaws of the snake, the snake
sucking it down its long throat.
All throat that snake--I couldn't tell
where the throat ended, the body
began. I remember the glass
case, the way that snake
took its time (all the girls, groaning, shrieking
but weren't we amazed, fascinated,
saying we couldn't look, but looking, weren't we
held there, weren't we
imagining--what were we imagining?)
Mrs. Peterson urged us to move on girls,
but we couldn't move. It was like
watching a fern unfurl, a minute
hand move across a clock. I didn't know why
the snake didn't choke, the rabbit never
moved, how the jaws kept opening
wider, sucking it down, just so
I am taking this in, slowly,
taking it into my body:
this grief. How slow
the body is to realize.
You are never coming back.
Anxieties
It’s like ants
and more ants.
West, east
their little axes
hack and tease.
Your sins. Your back taxes.
This is your Etna,
your senate
of dread, at the axis
of reason, your taxi
to hell. You see
your past tense—
and next? A nest
of jittery ties.
You’re ill at ease,
at sea,
almost in-
sane. You’ve eaten
your saints.
You pray to your sins.
Even sex
is no exit.
Ah, you exist.
Movie
My mother is scissoring strips of paper bag,
fringing the edges, stapling layers of feathery brown
to an old
jacket, then, rings glinting on her wedding finger,
whisks the scissor up each ribbon of fringe, tricks it
to curl, to turn
my brother into an owl. It's fall in the late
sixties. Late afternoon. She zips him in. Thirty
years later
it's a sudden rush into another fall. You can see it
in the invisible
exclamation points shooting through everything:
Wind! Trees! Shaky mums! The city's lousy with
academics!
a man on Houston St. says to what appears to be his
date. Suddenly it's cold
to dine outside. In the open window of Paradise Thai
two women lean across their flickering
candle, glasses of bright wine. A chilly tableau
framed by night, a lustrous couple
of inscrutable statues, pineapple crowns rising into
spires. At this point everything is still
possible. I wish they could see this. The moonlit
spires. Their lustrous doubles.
Every time, every single time I've followed desire,
my friend said last night, pressing her palms on my
kitchen table, every time:
Disaster. Its late. The babysitter will be fifty
dollars.
Moon! Time! Fifty dollars! What an expensive movie.
Sometimes we walk out of ourselves, blinking into the
indifferent
light, pulling our sweaters tighter, unprotected,
regressed from our time
in the dark, the crowd snaking through the lobby,
watching us, eager to enter
what we have left. We're always waiting for the next
thing
to change us. Facelifts, my ex-husband said last week,
are the new cure
for migraine. Light flickered its misty nimbus, his
face breaking up. I held my head.
Jews have over twenty-five words for schmo, I said,
apropos
of nothing. After so much pain, imagine
we can laugh. Though if you think in anagrams,
parades and drapes, diapers, rape, despair and aspire
all come out of paradise.
What was my mother thinking
as she made my brother an owl, as an ordinary man
and woman leaned toward one another at a railway
station table, away
from their marriages, across our TV screen, entering
the movie, heading into, then averting, perhaps,
disaster. Perhaps.
We feel change coming. Season of exclamation points.
Fringy mums shaking their yellow frazzle!
Last week, still summer, the young attendant in the
designer jeans store
held out our change, announced (sneak preview!) the
world
will end in 2012. According to the Mayan calendar.
So we might as well, he said, keep drinking the plastic
bottles of Poland Spring. Well, it's a doggy-dog world
as my sister says. My friend throws up her arms,
waves her bag of jeans. Her free alterations. Look
how much we've done
in just a few minutes! Look how we wait
for something to change us: love, jeans, a "Train of
Thought"
hanging in the subway car: As Gregor Samsa awoke one
morning
from uneasy dreams he found himself
transformed, etc. What did he dream? Did we find out?
Why remember the creature but not the dream?
What was my brother thinking as he flapped and whoo'd
across that stage? Whoo whoo whoo, he hooted for days.
Whoo whoo whoo