Elbows & Knots: ‘For the Night is Long and I am Lost Without You’ by Erica Ruppert

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“Eventually, she stopped writing altogether and only read, although she was never quite sure she understood.
Dena moved in, seeking clarity. It always escaped.”

One may feel holy in tune with such words in recent years, whatever gender is borne. I certainly gave up writing to only read, only connect … and the fulfilment and emptiness tussle with each other, giving birth to … what? This the transcendent story of Dena, as she writes upon the surface of water, to try to recapture her skills as a jobbing surreal poet before being drawn into this work, if not drowned into these rituals by a triangulated sisterhood. Water to stand in or swim in or give birth in (please see my very recent review of the Elizabeth Taylor threnody of Natation and Natalism HERE that miraculously acts as a spiritual synergy, by chance, with this Ruppert work). This is a house where we gradually gather around us Dena’s focussed place in it as we slowly did with the character in the previous Morgan story above of continued disjunction… and we are somehow involved in the actual impregnating or conception of what will later be borne, if possibly not born
“Just one of those coincidences that happen if something goes on long enough.”
And the seasons do indeed pass in this stylish work, long enough for the birth pangs to begin … both satisfying and desperate for the reader’s own attempts to fulfil the reading of this work, whatever its ending… with a hinge or trigger that somehow started kicking-in, for me, miraculously from this point in the text onward…

“Her knees and elbows were great knots on her skinny limbs as what she carried grew.”

My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/erica-ruppert/

Cf my previous translation of ‘knots’ as ‘ligotti’. — https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2015/11/27/le-noeud-de-ligotti/

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Full Vastarien context of above review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/06/10/vastarien-vol-5-issue-1/

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