The text also undertakes the project of revealing motives: why Ms. Harrison attempts to find objective correlatives 232Fourth Genre for her relationship with her father in beautifuUy spare descriptions ofother fragments from the time-how she is at one point afflicted by a narcolepsy which makes her faU asleep when she is talking to her father on the phone how she risks swimming in the ocean at night. Although The Kiss chronicles an affair between father and daughter which starts when she is twenty, the story is told almost completely from the inside. Harrison's memoir wfll disappoint readers who come to it with afternoon-TV expectations. Yet how different they are! Very different situations, different conceptions of the self, different styles. Both narratives manage to teU of extreme experiences without flinching or posturing. The fathers dominate the books too, though both daughters resist the temptation to make them simply monstrous. Dan Minock Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss and Sue WiUiam Sflverman's Because I Remember Terror, Father, I RememberYou (just re-issued in paperback) are both incest memoirs written by daughters who come to have a Ufe beyond the fathers who once dominated them. Dunn, who is as intuitive as Dobyns is calculating, doesn't give you the last word on these subjects, so much as your word, the best one you had, the one you hadn't articulated yet. There is a great range of subjects in the book: sports, gambUng, the schoolyard, fathers, shyness, lies, the writer as teacher. Precision, therefore, is more radical than passion.' Walking Light takes its title from an image in WiUiam Meredith's love poem 'Crossing Over,' where a couple is on a river ofmelting ice, and must learn somehow to 'walk Ught.' Dunn's favorite poets are ice travelers: 'each word they add, each new claim they make, results in the necessity of new accommodations.' The further into the poem their daring takes them, the more crucial it is to be aware ofcontext, and to make the right move-usuaUy the only right move.

His other caUing card is precision: 'It is a desirable, subversive act to replace what passes for truth with a more accurate/deep approximation, whether the subject is a dinner party or poverty. Here's one: 'We may continue to behave badly after absorbing a good poem, but it might be slightly harder to forgive ourselves.' I find Dunn's aesthetic very moral, mindful of appropriateness and the rules a poem sets up for itself, and testing what can be said in a given context against what you can't get away with saying. Urn:oclc:843006030 Republisher_date 20120924045655 Republisher_operator Scandate 20120921185039 Scanner lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:īook Reviews231 closest he comes to flashy is in 'The Good, the Not So Good,' which he wisely breaks into aphorisms. OL470983W Page-progression lr Pages 234 Ppi 500 Related-external-id urn:isbn:0812979710 Urn:oclc:record:1150128686 Extramarc University of Toronto Foldoutcount 0 Identifier kiss000harr Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t6zw2q70p Isbn 9780679449997ģ6487569 Ocr ABBYY FineReader 8.0 Openlibrary OL757739M Openlibrary_edition Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 20:13:28 Bookplateleaf 0008 Boxid IA158801 Boxid_2 CH108901 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Donorįriendsofthesanfranciscopubliclibrary Edition 1.

Kathryn harrison the kiss pdf