term as the nation's poet laureate this month, tell a story about his mother in the war-ravaged Yugoslavia of his youth. Bartering with a gold-toothed gypsy, she swapped his father's tuxedo for a suckling pig they ate on Christmas. The anecdote embodies for me Simic's genius: juxtaposition. Not the easy surrealism of two random things (fish and bicycle, say), but the binding together of Manichaean opposites: tuxedo and pig.from Mary Karr: The Washington Post: Poet's Choice
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