Meet my friend Kimberly:
me on the left, Kimberly on the right
at the Brick Store, one of my favorite Atlanta spots
Kimberly and I met ten years ago when we both worked at a very trendy European bar/restaurant/cafe in Atlanta called Cafe Intermezzo. I was home from college for the summer and Kimberly was getting ready to head off to Columbia in the fall (we're both from Georgia). We've stayed friends through all these years and several moves, and I think she's come to visit me pretty much everywhere I have lived!
After finishing her degree at Columbia in New York City, Kimberly joined the Peace Corps, spent a couple years in Africa, and is now in her third year of a Ph.D. program in cultural anthropology at Northwestern. Don't I have such interesting friends?
She gave me this book of poems for Christmas:
The incredible first book of Nick Lantz, We Don't Know We Don't Know is a collection of poems sprung from quotations from Donald Rumsfeld and Pliny the Elder. What a duo! I read almost the entire collection on the plane ride back to California (thank you so much Kimberly, totally made my long flight bearable!). The poems deal with a lot of eerie "what ifs," cause & effect, mythology, and the grittiness of rurality. Pretty incredible how Lantz incorporates these bewildering quotes of Rumsfeld and turns them into fascinating poems that, at their core, aren't even about politics.
I love discovering new poets--thank you Kimberly!
Now tell me about some of your Christmas gifts! (I have another one to share soon).