Poets and Poems: Angela Alaimo O’Donnell and “Andalusian Hours”

If you read, you’ve been there. It may be a single book, or it may be an author. It may be a literary work, or a popular novel you pick up at the grocery store. But each page shouts that you’ve found a kindred spirit, someone who occupies your mind and knows you as well as you know yourself.

I can name the books when that’s happened to me: The Pier Falls by Mark Haddon; All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr; A Whispered Name by William Brodrick; The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa; Farewell, I’m Bound to Leave You by Fred Chappell; Grief is a Thing with Feathers by Max Porter; David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. There are others, including a short story. I first read “A Good Man is Hard to Fund” by Flannery O’Connor in the 1970s, and as soon as I began reading, I knew with dead certainty what exactly was going to happen. As bizarre as that story was and remains, it is about the American South I grew up in and recognized.

For writer and teacher Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, the kindred spirit is that same Flannery O’Connor.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.