Oct
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At night, the stray dogs come up underneath our house to lick our leaking pipes.
—Marc Richard, from “Strays,” in The Ice at the Bottom of the World
About
Poets think in lines, prose writers in sentences; the best of both work from sound to sense, with an ear for the music in their compositions. S for Sentence celebrates lyricism in prose, the play and craft at work in the artful sentence. We post a sentence a month along with comments by a guest writer on the craft that shapes it, on what makes it great. In one or two sentences.—Pearl Abraham, Editor
“At night” creates immediate drama, and what follows is both a visual and acoustical event, the sound perfectly balanced between percussion—“up underneath;” “our house;” “lick our leaking”--and somnambulance. The hiccup of “up underneath” creates voice and character; “our” stirs a kind of enveloping magic. This short sentence conjures a whole world and makes me the author’s creature.
—Dawn Raffel is the author of, most recently, The Strange Case of Dr. Couney
—Dawn Raffel is the author of, most recently, The Strange Case of Dr. Couney