Do Feelings Speak Louder Than Words?

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Natalie Diaz

The sum of my failed attempts at writing stories is far greater than my number of years on this earth. But I assure you, it’s not for lack of trying. I’ve certainly felt moved to write stories on various occasions—happy, tragic, confusing, exciting—only to find that I eventually lose my focus. I’ve had an extremely difficult time figuring out the science, embarking on writing a short story only to find that my idea is much more extensive than the allotted number of pages, or deciding to write a longer story and losing momentum early on. I seem to be more successful with poems. When I imagine the beginning of a poem, I am usually able to envision the ending as well. For this reason, poems are an easier way for me to express emotions, an easier way to encapsulate a feeling without trying to represent it through the lens of a plot. When I read, I am searching for something raw. More often than not, I am able to find this in poems and better able to recreate it through poetry.

Last fall, I was introduced to Natalie Diaz, a Native American poet of the Mojave and Pima tribes. I fell in love with her poetry. Apart from writing beautifully, Natalie Diaz is honest and reflective, using words as vehicles to express the emotions generated by her traumatic experiences. Her book When My Brother Was an Aztec is a collection of poems centrally focused on her relationship with her brother, a drug addict, as well as her family’s struggle with poverty. Rather than telling the story of her brother’s addiction through one specific narrative voice, Diaz writes poems that simulate photographs, capturing moments that have made an impression on her. When I read her poetry, I feel like I’m reading the pages of her diary.

In “How to Go to Dinner with a Brother on Drugs,” Diaz describes taking her brother out to dinner, an event that is really more of a complicated process than a recreational activity.  The tenth stanza reads: “Not long ago,/your brother lived with you./You called it, One last shot, a three-quarter-court/heave, a buzzer-beater to win something of him back./But who were you kidding? You took him in/with no grand dreams of salvation, but only to ease/the guilt of never having tried.” The last two lines of the stanza are so poignant. I’m struck by Diaz’s honesty, her admission that she “took him in” to relieve her own guilt rather than try to save him. I admire the clarity of her confession more than a stanza full of beautiful metaphors.

Diaz’s reasoning for taking her brother in, while expressed simply, is complexly human. It captures her internal moral struggle as well as an articulate sense of herself. Am I on to something here? Do you agree that the best poetry directly addresses emotions, or does it use metaphor to depict them? Do you prefer poems that maintain elusive representations of emotions and focus on language? No matter your preference, I encourage you all to explore Natalie Diaz’s poetry. She’s sure not to disappoint!


Laura Berry is a senior English major and Poverty Studies minor at Washington and Lee. She is from Madison County, VA, where she spends most of her time with her dog, Russ.

“This Darksome Burn” by Nick Ripatrazone

For a blog post that I wrote earlier this month, I had the chance to speak with author and current contributor to Shenandoah, Nick Ripatrazone.  A professor living in New Jersey with his wife and 5-month-old identical twin girls, Ripatrazone gave me the inside scoop on his newly released novella This Darksome Burn and the process that surrounded the writing of this work in particular.  You can read more on that here.  Having now had the opportunity to read the novella myself, I feel that I can give Snopes readers a little more insight into This Darksome Burn and the features that make it stand out from anything else you’ll find on the shelves of your local bookstore.

TDBcoverSet in the rural Oregon wilderness, the novella centers around the lives of the three members of the McGovern family: Luke; his daughter, Aurea; and his son, Ford.  From the outset of the story, it is apparent that the family has been through hardship.  The mother is conspicuously absent, and the McGovern family farm seems far from prospering as it did in past generations.  However, the opening chapters work to assert the age-old idiom “when it rains, it pours”; in the first five pages alone, Luke loses the last of his family’s horses and returns home to discover that his daughter has been raped by her ex-boyfriend Baxter.  This tragic event throws the family into turmoil as Aurea attempts to make sense of what has happened to her while her father simply seeks revenge.  Stuck in the middle, Ford tries to reconcile his family’s troubles, becoming fixated on finding the lost horse as a way to assuage their pain.  This Darksome Burn raises questions about family, relationships, the nature of life and how much control we as humans have over it.

Even more significant than that of Baxter or the watchful eye of the local police, the environment is an ever-present threat in the lives of the McGovern family.  Attempting to survive in the shadow of Oregon’s Siskiyou Mountains, the characters battle harsh weather, the rural landscape, and a variety of wildlife throughout the course of the novella.  These elements of nature are characters in their own right, especially the stream that curves through the woods surrounding the McGovern property.  This small, seemingly insignificant body of water is referred to by multiple characters, and it is described by all with apprehension and a sense of foreboding.  Nothing good occurs from interacting with this particular element of nature, a rule that the McGovern family seems to learn the hard way.

Nick_RipatrazoneWhen I initially compiled the interview material for use in my first blog post about This Darksome Burn, I was a little thrown off by Ripatrazone’s assertion that film had played a significant role in his writing process.  However, after reading the novella and experiencing the short, scene-like chapters, I completely understand how these “snapshots” of life work to create the story’s unique style.  Each chapter generally centers around one main subject and uses vivid description and extremely focused language to fully immerse the reader in the scene.  The chapters vary in length and when they occur (some jump months ahead while others simply describe the next action), but they all give a “zoomed in” view of the significant events in the story.  I would even liken reading This Darksome Burn to watching a film put together by an immensely skilled director, one who, with painstaking detail, captures exactly what he wants the viewer to see in each shot through his lens.

I would recommend Nick Ripatrazone’s This Darksome Burn to any reader who appreciates being fully immersed in fiction.  While I have admittedly not read a plethora of novellas, this example of the genre kept me engaged throughout its entirety with its innovative “snapshot” chapters and the raw emotion exhibited by the characters.  Of perhaps even greater value, it forced me to think about difficult aspects of the human condition while leaving me with more questions than answers by the end.

Check out Nick Ripatrazone’s new novella This Darksome Burn, which is available from Queen’s Ferry Press.