Catherine Daly, Locket.

Oh yikes. A reader. So I went back and reread The Thorn the other day. And then tried to find my copy of Orientalism which is somewhere in the garage right now and who knows in which box (unlike LRSN I do not have inventory of the contents of each box in my life; alas). And then tried to rethink LRSN's work.

My first thought was to think about Lisa Jarnot's terrorism poems. Which seem to be treading on similar territory as the LRSN poems. What makes the Jarnot poems so striking/scary/great is that the I becomes the terrorist.

At first I thought the LRSN poems about Osama Bin Laden are not doing this; they aren't about "our" intimacy with "elsewhere" (and again, I want to read Gary's book as about that "our" intimacy with global culture). Then I thought the word about in that sentence should be the one in scare quotes. Their presence in the book suggests that they have an aboutness that matters? And so I think I can't really answer this question about orientalism in the The Thorn because I am having trouble figuring out so far what the stories are doing in The Thorn beyond a reading of them as the meat eating flower promised on the back cover. Or the poking thorn. The other culture (double square quotes?) that enters and requires thought? Complicated thought? Which would mean not orientalist thought?