Painted Bride Quarterlys Slush Pile

Summer scrambled us, Slushies, from UAE to North Carolina, from D.C. to Scotland and back, from North Carolina to New York City, and to Philly, of course. Phew! Sam has just returned after a month-long residency through the Hawthornden Foundation in Scotland in an actual castle where she worked on her novel. The crew came together on Zoom to discuss two poems by Elvira Basevich, “Beautiful Girls” and “Pallas Athena”. The first poem transports Kathy and Marion to their teenage days on the Jersey shore. For Marion, the ending of the poem with its Beauty in the bathroom mirror, recalls the energy of Ada Limón’s “How to Triumph like a Girl”.     The discussion of “Pallas Athena” notes the poem’s foresight to mark a memory as it’s made, which sends Marion to Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey and has Lisa mis-marking that poem as the one with daffodils. Imagining the future while in the past also reminds Marion of André Aciman’s discussion of arbitrage and Tintern Abbey in the New Yorker. We talk about endings, Slushies,