Gandhi's Lap

Parenting & Relationships

Warren, Charlotte Gould

Family Relationships

The Word Works

With deceptively pellucid language, Dangerous Bodies offers, in poem after poem, precise, jewel-like crystallizations of understanding that illuminate the craggy and often harrowing emotional terrain of a family gone wrong.  Out of abandonment and incest, the wounded child turns to the long building of a self she can rightfully claim as her own.  Knowing that "Closeness and distance / are all that we can be sure of", Warren successfully navigates the road from indictment of her father —"All your life you were generous and ruined, / and you took us with you." — to the astonishingly merciful "It’s no one’s fault, this life." In meeting up with a small shorebird that regularly travels 20,000 miles a year from Africa to Alaska and the Arctic, Warren finds a perfect analog to her own poems: "song precariously perched; witness / against the barrens of space".  Through lovingly learning the names and life patterns of creatures and plants native to her part of the world, she shows us how we, too, can more fully anchor ourselves in a fundamentally nourishing reality.

Dangerous Bodies

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Stephen F. Austin University Press

<p>Charlotte Warren’s memoir, <i>Jumna</i>, chronicles her childhood in India during its fight for independence from Great Britain, and her coming of age in the United States during the turbulent sixties. "Several girls ended up in a fight, the buckle of a classmate’s shoe caught in another girl’s hair. Cries of pain. In the fray, I was accused of fueling the argument with a mean remark, but although I agreed with the remark, it had come from someone else. Unable to get at the truth, Miss Gasper lined us up, littlest ones in front, and brought out the long wooden hair brush we dreaded. Pants down, bent over, we each received a paddling. Anticipation and the sounds of others crying terrified us more than the thwack itself. I vowed never to hit children. Before bedtime, each of us was given four pieces of toilet paper and told to have a bowel movement. If we couldn’t, we were fed a spoonful of cod liver oil. We soon learned to lie. The toilet paper, a lifeless grey, was stiff and needed to be rubbed to soften it. It carried the imprint of the crown of His Majesty the King of England."</p>

Jumna

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Books by Warren, Charlotte Gould