keen-edged

A peak and isle of rock it was, black and gleaming hard: four mighty piers of many-sided stone were welded into one, bur near the summit they opened into gaping horns, their pinnacles sharp as the points of spears, keen-edged as knives.

“Good People” traces the parallel tracks of its fictional protagonists, a German advertising guru called Thomas Heiselberg, and a Russian-Jewish aspiring poet, Sasha Weissberg, with a keen-edged surgeon’s knife.

The keen-edged flakes of stone were excavated from an ancient river floodplain in southwest Sulawesi, near the present-day village of Talepu.

Once inside the monster, the wily god resumed his proper size and power; and with his keen-edged knife proceeded to cut the vitals of the belligerent beaver, until at last all life ceased, and the huge carcass was cast up by the tide on Clatsop beach, just south of the mouth of the Great River.

But at the same time, as she made resoundingly clear in interviews, in public lectures and in her work, Ms. Rich saw poetry as a keen-edged beacon by which women’s lives — and women’s consciousness — could be illuminated.