Katie Ford read at a PBQ sponsored reading a few months ago and I was impressed with poems from a chapbook, Storm. Ford lived in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, and the poems in this chapbook focus on the natural and emotional landscape of the city before, during, and after the hurricane. As the Gulf Coast is currently going through some more problems, I picked up the book again.
I'm still impressed. The book is haunting and brilliant, like a walk through a forest which holds you suspect. At first you feel like you have little business being there (and little sense of how to get out). Ford doesn't offer to make sense of Katrina, but through short poems that range from the creepy and surreal to the everyday language of the angered and confused man-on-the-street, she makes the realities of the storm and its aftermath take on mysterious and new shapes. I will be reading Ford's other books.
Now this colossal oil spill: who will write these poems? Who will add rhythm to these new stories?
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