Like Life

Like Life is a book of short stories by Lorrie Moore - a friend introduced me to her work a few years ago with her book, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? Moore is a very funny and poetic writer. Her short stories remind me of M. Atwood (she's that good!)

In one story, the main character is a poet who writes poems about "whores" - Moore intersperses the story with poems:

They come down to the truckers
or the truckers go up
to the rooms with the curtains pell-mell.
They truck down for the fuckers
or else they fuck up
in the Pepsi Have a Pepsi Hotel.

Later she writes:

She should stay here with him, unorphan him with love's unorphaning, live wise and simple in a world monstrous enough for years of whores and death, and poems of whores and death so monstrous how could one live in it at all? One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them. She should live where there were trees. She should live where there were birds. No bird, no tree had ever made her unhappy.