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Poetry

A few notes on a passage from Doris Lessing’s THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK

Jane Huffman

It occurs to me that I can’t, either,
remember a single instance
in which I have made a decision.

It occurs to me like memory
does, like something I have already
experienced and must now

experience again. I am blow-drying
for a party I have decided not
to go to. And then, I’m in a living

room decorated in the style
of the twenty-first century,
surrounded by people who have

decided not to be there. It’s hard
to decide. I can’t arrive at it
through an instant, narrow it down––

It would be like combing a single hair.

Jane Huffman

Jane Huffman’s debut poetry collection, Public Abstract, won the 2023 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize. She is a doctoral candidate in English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver and has an MFA from the University of Iowa. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Nation, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. Jane was a 2019 recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.

Poetry

  • A few notes on a passage from Doris Lessing’s THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK

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