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In A House of Girls, Thomas Rain
Crowe writes in the long-standing German literary genre of the Bildungsroman
(education through experience). In this linked-stories,
coming-of-age book of autobiographical fiction, we see and hear echoes
of the great great writers in this tradition, such a Goethe, Joyce,
Novalis, Dickens and Thomas Mann. Crowe's "house" and
his "girls" are what has formed him, and we follow him from
room to room in these sensitive and engaging love stories, all of which
have an unusual and unique twist.
Crowe is an internationally recognized poet and translator whose work
has been published in several languages. He is the author of twenty
books of original works, translations, anthologies and recordings
including The Laugharne Poems, written at the Dylan Thomas home
in Laugharne, Wales and published by Welsh publisher Carreg Gwalch; Thomas
Rain Crowe & The Boatrockers LIVE, which received praise by such
poet-musicians as Joy Harjo and by Pete Townshend of The Who; and
the multi-award winning book of nonfiction Zoro's Field: My Life in
the Appalachian Woods, published in 2005 by the Univ. of Georgia
Press. As an editor, he has been an instrumental force behind such
magazines as Beatitude, Katuah Journal, and the Asheville
Poetry Review. As a translator, he has translated collections by
poets such as Hafiz and Yvan Goll. His archives have been purchased and
are collected by the Duke University Special Collections Library. He
lives in the Smoky Mountains of rural western North Carolina.
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From A House of
Girls --
Whether or not the
surge of energy between our two bodies caused the blackout that
night is still anyone's guess. But the fact that it was at the
moment of simultaneous orgasm that the lights chose to go out in
all of Manhattan, I still believe is more than coincidence. We
just lay there on the rooftop in the rain and laughed, as, one by
one, burglar-alarms began going off all over town, followed by the
choral dissonance created by the addition of squad car sirens from
the borough police.
We finished
laughing, and in an attempt to reverse the electric spell we had
cast upon the city, we made love again. But the spell was
irreversible and the damage done, so we resolved ourselves to the
dark by deciding to venture out into the streets.
In the wake of the
blackout, the neighborhoods had become alive with activity. People
had come out of their apartments into the streets, and suddenly
the huge concrete island of Manhattan had become a tribal village.
It was like a science-fiction story where a whole city of
high-rise graves had been abandoned by a million corpses tired of
their boring vertical fate, and had, on cue, come out into the
streets, into the light. In the height of city summer heat, water
mains were liberated, battery-powered boom boxes set up on stoops,
and all of New York was dancing in the street. Those not dancing
were sitting around card tables playing cards with neighbors whom
they hadn't seen in years, or in some cases whom they'd never met.
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