We learned this week that Rynn Williams, the winner of the second Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, has died. The circumstances of her death are still not clear. She leaves behind a family, though I don't know much about them, even as I've been thinking a lot about who they might be and what they might be going through.
I have had her book, Adonis Garage, here on the desk in front of me for most of this week. It's full of life, desire, of New York, of looking back that's neither nostalgia nor regret but not quite celebration either of a time of glam and costume that rarely gets revisted, at least in verse.
And I want to post a piece that Rynn published in Prairie Schooner and read when she visited us a couple of years ago:
Chicken
was crucial to the Scarsdale Diet--and despite Miss Trevor,
staunch vegetarian, appalled--I sucked down whole birds.
Intricate ribs, dense gray thighbones, the way
dark tendons fell away--who cares if the diet was useless?
I was fourteen, I'd just lost my innocence.
Giddy from grease, protein and hormones,
the heat of the city playground in August
and the thrill of Miss Trevor's frank disdain,
I was tossing gristle on a pile, licking my fingertips,
nothing but chicken and boys to devour:
Robert and Frankie, Skip and McVey--
seeing the world through a haze of roast meat--
all those boys, all that warm flesh, sinew and fat,
juice on my lips, those piles of shiny bones.
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