In the remainder of the “Emptying” segment of Three Tides, Chapter 2: Hip, Hip, But Not Hurrah, Chapter 3: Love and War, and Chapter 4: Summing Up; Pineda covers her battle with her HMO to receive treatment for her mystery ailment, the course of a new relationship against the backdrop of the upcoming war in Iraq, and a brief summation of her general feelings about the state of the world. Every time I read Pineda I am always struck by the poetic beauty of her word choices. She can write these amazingly constructed, evocative, insightful, impactful sentences which seem to want to stick with me forever, and I hope they do.
When she describes a glacial melt during an Alaskan cruise she says, “they yield up the air they may have held for hundreds of millennia.” And when she speaks of the return of romance in her life she describes love as, “momentary consolation for the enduring pain of living.” And even in describing people milling about while talking on their cellphones her sentences have a vividness which renders the banal activity something artistic. She doesn’t just say they are walking around talking on their phones, she says, “chattering their GPS chatter, declaring where they imagine themselves to be, where they hope to get, and how soon they intend getting there.” It becomes so much more of an instantly recognizable snippet of modern human life which I have seen, and done, a million times.
Her writing haunts me - in the best possible way!
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