Airships

by Barry Hannah

[jamiereadthis]

As usual, as always: there’s something so unholy about Barry Hannah’s sentences that I want to strip them all of context and make the most beautiful poetry.

A lot of praise gets sung for “Testimony of Pilot,” and rightfully so, but the simple “Water Liars,” the mad and sweet “Love Too Long,” the Vietnam Catch-22 “Midnight And I’m Not Famous Yet,” and the delightfully slow-revealing horror of “Eating Wife and Friends”— more Walking Dead than Walking Dead, more The Road than The Road, and so funny in the midst of cannibalism it had me laughing out loud— are the ones that won my own heart. And my most favorite of them all (and of the Jeb Stuart stories): the rip-roaring “Dragged Fighting From His Tomb.” The Civil War in a horse, “Christ is his name, this muscle and heart striding under me.”