French Milk, WWII, and an American Poem

I was recently dusting and straightening one of my usual sections at Barnes and Noble at the end of the night when a new paperback in Travel caught my eye, "French Milk" by Lucy Knisley. It is a record of the 6 weeks this young woman and her mother spent in Paris. She's a cartoonist (graphic artist?) and captures her memories in bits of writing, drawings, and some photographs. It was quick read, and it took me to Paris, but in a more surface-level, touristy way, not the way Kim Sunee's Trail of Crumbs made me feel through her sad story of love and loss in France. Kind of weird that I picked this up just after saying here that I could never read a graphic novel. It's not a graphic novel, but graphic travel writing, and that's different for me.

Now I've picked up a book that my young friend Zoe is reading, Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston. It's about a woman's childhood experience in a Japanese internment camp in the United States. I started it on Pearl Harbor Day.

And last night, I took a book of poems to bed with me, Billy Collins' Ballistics.

I leave you with one of his poems:

Searching

I recall someone once admitting
that all he remembered of Anna Karenina
was something about a picnic basket,

and now, after consuming a book
devoted to the subject of Barcelona--
its people, its history, its complex architecture--

all I remember is the mention
of an albino gorilla, the inhabitant of a park
where the Citadel of the Bourbons once stood.

The sheer paleness of him looms over
all the notable names and dates
as the evening strollers stop before him

and point to show their children.
These locals called him Snowflake,
and here he has been mentioned again in print

in the hope of keeping his pallid flame alive
and helping him, despite his name, to endure
in this poem where he has found another cage.

Oh, Snowflake,
I had no interest in the capital of Catalonia--
its people, its history, its complex architecture--

no, you were the reason
I kept my light on late into the night
turning all those pages, searching for you everywhere.