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Carrie Fountain's "The Life" - by Devin Kelly

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I’ve been familiar with Carrie Fountain’s work for awhile now, but have never read any of her books, and so, not long ago, I found myself — as I often do — in a bookstore, opening Fountain’s book, The Life, for the first time, turning to today’s poem, titled the same as the book that it is from, and smiling at the dry wit and observational humor and flowing use of the word and in the poem’s first six lines. I love when a poem begins in dailiness and moves such dailiness into the realm of the spiritual. This poem — and so much of Fountain’s work that I have now read, after reading both this poem and the book that it is from — does that work. For all we say about the lives that we live, which is this life or the life, for all we critique our lives and generalize them and make broad, reaching statements about them, I’ve found that a poem — just one, really, is all it takes — can snap the wide net of the general that I often cast over my own life, and can let all that I’ve bundled into tha

Carrie Fountain's "The Life" Thoughts on this, too, being a life. Devin Kelly Feb 25, 2024 25 6 5 Share The Life Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published The toilet flows and flows and nothing stops it so I call a plumber but then it stops on its own so I call back and say it stopped and cancel. I have these little ideas for making my life a marginally better life. I can't think of one right now. Otherwise, I find as soon as I come within range the spirit retreats. Before long, it never existed. As with a celebrity, I will always have to remember meeting the spi

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