Sunday, July 18, 2010

This Book Will Change Your Life - Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt by Ken Sparling.

We have been trying to think about how best to describe not just our great love for Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt by Ken Sparling, but the emotional impact it had on us as we read it. At first we thought about other things we read this year that crushed us, for example, the short stories Brains for Bengo from Jim Ruland's collection Big Lonesome or An Optimist is the Human Personification of spring from Caleb J. Ross' collection Charactered Pieces, but we realized there was a significant difference in our reactions. These stories struck a nerve because they spoke to unspeakable and irrational fears, pain inflicted on children and a parent's inability to get things right, but Hush Up struck a nerve because of its ability to speak not to our irrational fears, but to what we know, the day to day experience of parenting, the joys, frustrations, anger and pain, and the emotions that come with seeing yourself on the page and knowing the experience itself is so profoundly fraught with emotions at all times you would just as soon not read about it to give yourself a break. Of course, we have to read, and we have to feel things, and because of this, Hush Up is all the more powerful and certain to change your life.

1 comment:

Ryan W. Bradley said...

couldn't have said it better myself!