About the Poems - AA
About the Poems
by Arlene Ang "In the Dark, Repetitive Coughing" was originally written for the glass rooster theme of Six Little Things. It's a reflection on death: we used to be six in the family, now we're down to three — and I'm not even thirty-five yet. The part about the cockscomb is true. "So Many Brooms, Why This Curtain" reacts to the seemingly "international" tradition that women should be at home doing housework. "pool: still life with" follows the sequence: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1. I rather like how the form seems to explode right in the middle and then gets suck back into itself. "I'm not the only liar in town" is an old poem (2005) that has gone through so many revisions that I've started calling it my Frankenstein monster. One of the phrases that's managed to survive is scrotum swell of sky — around which the whole poem, like a man, has more or less evolved. "Mountains" attempts to explore the internal mechanics of an individual diagnosed with cancer.