Rice
Tres Chicas Books, 2005
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Joan Logghe says of her book, Rice, "One night I wrote four poems on a long sheet of rice paper. I noticed they had a uniform shape and decided to give myself the pleasure of writing domestic sonnets. For two and a half years they spilled off of rice paper and into my computer. I have always played with how you can make art in the cracks of the daily, in this case the amount of time it takes for rice to cook, and at the end of the boiling, there is a poem. This book was held together by rice. It is as formal and as formless as those grains, both cooked and uncooked."

"I love the sudden changes in these sonnets. The poems gallop all over the landscape. Things change fast as in art or life"
–Robert Bly.

Excerpt

You gave me a love bite the week
I turned fifty, and I became like
all other women. The woman at Mustang
Gas. The woman who works
at Walgreens whose mother works at
Walgreens also.The women named for stars
and those named for hope. Women who love God
and worship inside and outside churches.

Those women who stand outside the house
and weep, and those whose body has failed
them and those who have failed their bodies.
All of these, bitten by love, as I
have been, unbeknownst to me on the week
I turned fifty.

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