Drive by Elaine Sexton
These poems move by image and color, weather and that inimitable thing “drive.” Poetic drive, drive to get from one place to another, drive as escape, drive as energy are explored in incantatory poems that signal the prime of this poet alive in the world and all its macro and micro sensory details and circumstances today in 2023.
Signal Fires by Dani Shapiro
In the acknowledgements Shapiro thanks Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit From The Good Squad, for proposing that narrative interest lies only in the non-chronological arrangement of material. In this moving book, Shapiro does more than just re-arrange a narrative; with indelible characters and searing bonds she delivers two families wrecked by death and the way that time refracts back on itself: like a dog’s curly tail, life and death meet in the most profound ways.
Animal Joy by Naur Alsadir
I loved this exuberant, varied, dense, genre-bending book by poet and psycho- anlayst, Alsadir. Woven with anecdotes about the mind and language of her two daughters, texts by psychoanalytic thinkers, musings on divorce and the idiosyncratic, always bitingly sonic and truthful prose of the author herself whose main preoccupation here is the the “animal joy” of certain kinds of human happiness versus the more fabricated or modulated types. (Feeling animal joy, we smile and show our teeth and our eyes crinkle.) A rush of language is the only faucet suitable for a psychoanalyst whose roots are derived in narrative and the myriad meanings of the words we use to describe our lives. In this way Alsadir is both analyst and analysand, poet and prose stylist.
Also A Poet by Ada Calhoun
I was intrigued by this memoir by the daughter of Peter Scheldahl, the late art critic for the New Yorker, who was also a poet. Ada is not. The also refers to Frank O’Hara about whom the book tells us very little. Calhoun is, admittedly, not a poetry scholar. She writes mainly as a daughter yearning to connect with her father writer-to writer, and chronicles their frustratingly elusive bond. Peppered with famous names, the book also reads as a chronicle of arts and letters from the beat era through Scheldalh’s death in 2020.
Oh, William! by Elizabeth Strout
Strout, again, inhabits Lucy Barton, from her former book, I Am Lucy Barton, who, in turn, inhabits Strout: Barton is a writer who is haunted by her childhood and feels “invisible” even as she publishes and succeeds. Whether this is Strout’s story, I do not know, but it may be universal among writers: We feel unseen so we seek authority. Strout writes this novel without an abundance of the artifice of realist novels. Strout/Barton doesn’t show, she tells, of her marriages, her affairs, her children, her life as a child and a writer. In this weaving through time and memory, her novel, is in some ways, a more realistic rendering of the way we think and love. The exclamation that is the title is often repeated. The exclamation point, at first seems a short-cut but with repetition it becomes profound, as if to say, I love William emphatically, and always will.
American Sonnets For My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes
Some titles are the signifier and some are the sign. This title is verse itself with its built- in juxtaposition of past and future; its complexity. If we’re in the future, then the poet is already dead. If we’re in the past, the poet is a ghost. The title is the same for each sonnet in this remarkable, violent, loving, tender outpouring to all the people and things that both kill and sustain black people in America. I read it in one sitting and its cumulative affect is stirring.
A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver
Slim, bossy and erudite, this is one of the only practical books about poetry that I’ve read. Oliver demonstrates the techniques of poetry and defines the terms as well as what NOT to do. She also reveals something harder to capture; the undeniable value of the organic, the intuitive, the happy accidents and the associative leaps that comprise genius.
Beautiful World, Where Are You? By Sally Rooney
Rooney has a gift for making real the pleasures of sex and intimacy— a shower in the morning while a close friend you’ve just had great sex with makes you coffee—the pleasure of a long friendship, but complicates these joys by questioning their centrality in both the novel and our current world. Via an eerily distant omniscience that makes note of each character’s nearly constant preoccupation with their screens, and an erudite and thoughtful email exchange among intelligent best friends, Rooney elucidates the seeming paradox of being a novelist consumed with relationships and love in an irreparably broken world. How can it matter who you love when the climate is warming? Her third novel, the book feels like a reflection on what she’s already done as a novelist—made real the complexity of love—in favor of an oscillation between that feat and a meta-analysis of it. Ultimately, here, love and these characters matter.
Wayward by Dana Spiotta
In precise, mellifluous prose, Spiotta limns the experience of a middle aged, middle class mother with a teenager in the shaky aftermath of the Trump presidency. To say I felt affinity with this scenario is an understatement. More so, I felt the thrill of reading about a protagonist who rarely stars in a novel. The terrain is deemed too white, too cis, too normative and is frankly, too female. Who knew menopause could be so dramatic? Half the population always knew. At times, I felt as if the author got it wrong, or the protagonist, Sam, was actually too encumbered by privilege to see beyond her ennui to her actual real life advantages.… Yet, suffering is always subjective and Spiotta plumbs the depth of this inherent irony with humor and skill. Each person suffers in their own way and Sam is presented here in all her humanity whether we like her or not.
The Invented Mother
My first poetry chapbook, The Invented Mother, was a finalist in The New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition 2022 and will be published in Fall 2023 by Finishing Line Press.
Advance Praise for THE INVENTED MOTHER
In her stunning debut collection, The Invented Mother, Thea Goodman questions and explores the shifting notions of identity and the vicissitudes of parenthood. With complex syntax, lush imagery and associative leaps, these poems plumb emotional depths. Thea Goodman strikes a stance uniquely her own in this stellar chapbook.
—Elise Paschen, author of The Nightlife
From “desert dust that swirls like advice” to the “bones of dead pronouns,” and coyotes who prowl across poems, Thea Goodman’s new collection kicks up wisdom, beauty, despair, love, sex, and rejuvenation. Her range is vast; from free verse to sonnets, Goodman’s poems reframe what was once familiar into something fresh and complex. Spinning motherhood, babyhood, selfhood, and transformation into kaleidoscopic wonder, these poems examine how we make and unmake our lives and selves. “I died early and am a tourist on earth,” Goodman writes, and in this and other lovely, funny moments, readers will be reminded how lucky we are that she made these poems — lyrical visitations from a supremely talented and thoughtful poet.
––Rachel DeWoskin, author of absolute animal and Two Menus
In a Thea Goodman poem the speaker-mother’s reasoning is ravenous, her discourse, vigorously original, bitingly sonic. The internal rhymes in the poems of her debut collection braid color, light, and ideas into music that is rarely straightforward, but utterly compelling. An example of the invented self as a new mother appears vividly in “After,” The spring drops white petals hot / snow upon limestone pavers that smell like // sex. Goodman plays with form that introduces parentheticals and fragments that ricochet on the page. These poems are both timeless and of-the- moment, as in “Bones of Dead Pronouns”: I remember / the hose splitting the sun, my thumb on the nozzle, high / shrieks of summer, when they were a girl. At the heart of this truly ravishing poetry is a plaintive voice giving new shape to experience, and making art of it, art you will ponder and savor.
– Elaine Sexton, author of Drive
About THE INVENTED MOTHER
The poems in The Invented Mother question the social construction and the reality of mothering, parenting children that defy the gender binary, and the mystery of family relationships on a changing planet.
The book will be available for pre-order after May 2023 and can be purchased here!
The cover design is still in-progress but you can see the art work on my homepage. The cover art is by Iris Bernblum and is a painting based on my poem “Early March” which you can read below.
________________________
Early March
Not one coyote prowling
the school, but a pack, eating
the heads off the pink tulips
and administrative boxwoods.
Molting daffodils and leeks,
cold ankles, too thin jacket
makes memory of new outfits,
dust of desire and cigarettes
on 86th Street, smooth
apples of our unlined cheeks
to an orchard in Queens
and my grandfather whistling, gay
hands cutting forsythia.
”Early March” was written in 2020 just before the global pandemic at a time when the world was already in chaos and the coyote sitings, one of many signs of environmental degradation, felt like a portent.
I studied poetry with Elaine Sexton.
Elaine’s latest book is Drive and she teaches at The Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence and independently.
Read my poem “Summer Novel” here.
Memory, Process, Story
Below is a project I did with artist, Diana Frid and musician, Mark Gallay in 2004 when I’d only loved in Chicago for 1 year. I was four months pregnant and knew hardly anyone and no one knew. My husband was at Burning Man, clinging, I think, to the last vestiges of a certain kind of freedom and I was in town alone. I was energized by meeting my new friends in The Fine Art’s Building on Michigan Avenue and spending several hours there as we figured out together what to do with our allotted space, which was a broken elevator. This is the written result of that collaboration.
I’ve been reflecting on it lately when I teach, trying to piece together how one makes a thing; Stuck with yourself at zero on a number line you have the past behind you, that is memory. Memory of course runs into imagination when you stretch to find words for it. The future is all imagination. That makes it so appealing. Process is what you do to get from the past to the future, what you do in the present of course. The intertwined nature of narrative and time and narrative as an act in time fascinates and troubles me. We’re stuck with this linear plane. We’re also graced by time, that gives meaning to events.
Elevator
First Floor: Memory, New York City 1973
There is a honeycomb grate in our elevator that covers the light fixture. When the brass accordion door closes I settle in for the thirteen-floor descent with my mouth open, my chin raised to catch something sweet from the ceiling. Yellow octagons of light give my mother a glow that she typically lacks. I watch as she faces the large mirror opposite the door; she traces her middle fingers under each eye and presses her lips together, her last moment of primping.
On thirteen my mother had been crying, but here inside the elevator no one would know. When I’d asked her, why’re you crying?she looked at the elevator button, pressed it once, hard, then turned back to me and smiled. The smile toothy, terrible. I looked away from her blanched face and listened to the sound of the elevator whistling upward, the clank and squeak of the heavy doors as they came closer.
On the ride down my mother clears her voice and asks Benny, the elevator man, how he is. He says, fine, thank you, and you? She says, just fine, firmly, like the way she pressed the call button. As we descend, air from the shaft filters through the door: gray air of pigeon, taxi crush and soot, it feels refreshing. It feels easy and fancy when it blows in my face like I’m in the back seat of a car by the beach and this is sea breeze through an open window. I watch the precision of Benny’s black, combed hair, oiled and neat where it meets his brown skin and crisp white collar.
Eighth Floor: Process, Chicago 2004
We discuss putting a palm tree inside the stalled eighth floor elevator of The Fine Art’s Building, formerly The Studebaker Carriage Company. Nature and industry seem incongruous. (Like the orchid house by the lake.) Discuss flow of the building’s utility from horses to pianos. The elevator as a conduit carrying people, ideas, human detritus, cells in handrails, whispers over a century.
Sound comes first, resonant voices, violins. Industry, practice, devotion; the processes of making everything. Wandering the building, arched windows face the lake; a blue inspiration. Reverie grows, distracts. That view can’t be pinned down. Why can’t we live here? The building generates its own activity. It’s ghostly in a good way, nobody at all inside an interior courtyard that feels foreign: Paris, Mexico City. Distant steps, the stone pattern on the ground, carry us to other places.
Our frozen elevator poses problems. Stalled motion, broken flow, stasis in what was by nature, a carrier. A time capsule? The other elevators are sound nets, zooming throats, gigantic ears. They speak urbanity, glamour and also earthiness of pigeon and sky. They hear everything. Ours is dark and uncompromising. It’s difficult.
But biopsy is possible in stasis. A broken elevator is a voice that’s stuck, an echo chamber carrying the dead, a wind instrument, (the musician says, also a percussive instrument.) Forget the incongruous; fill it with what it is. Cables and mass. A biological model. Rough cords and wires, that which transmits but is broken. Still, the elevator remains still, the center of a timeline. Write all the ways it carries me: carriage backwards to childhood memory; the hovering point which is zero and this description of process. The artist, the musician and I we aim for synthesis, carriage forward, to an imagined story. This is an attempt at motion.
Thirteenth Floor: Story, New York City 1973 and Chicago, 2004
The two mothers met one night on the landing by the elevator like they often did. I followed mine to the front door, let it slam and peered out the peephole. Linda, mine, wore a white flannel nightgown. Nan, the mother next door, older but shorter, wore a wispy, peach negligee. Tonight, my mom wore sneakers and carried a purse like she was going out. A runaway mother was impossible but she said, I’ve got to get out of here.
Dressed like that?
I watched as my mother pulled the ruffled cuff of one sleeve. They’ve seen worse. (One of the building’s fathers had, what the mothers had called, a nervous breakdown, and rang for the elevator nude.)
Come inside for a while instead.
My mom shook her head and pressed the call button deliberately, the way always did, like she did like she was in charge and knew what she was talking about. She smoothed her hair as Nan lit a cigarette and exhaled.
I scraped a chair close to the door so I could listen without tiptoes. What was that? My mom said, startled. I froze, She had heard the chair. She had caught me listening before.
I didn’t hear anything, Nan said.The elevator hissed below, carrying a brief sharp peal of a woman’s laughter. Floors below, the oiled roll of the brass doors clanked shut. As the elevator approached, the wind from the shaft blew up onto the landing and the nightgown fluttered, rose up, exposing one smooth thigh.
Marilyn!Nan said. The nightgown billowed until my mother was so fat and light that she might float away. But the gown deflated as the elevator grew closer and then lurched to a stop, shimmying a little bit up and down to meet the landing. I wondered if she was wearing underwear. Nan whispered into my mother’s ear and then the mothers laughed, loudly at first, leaning over their bellies, then silently, quaking, as tears ran down their faces and Benny, dignified in his dark navy uniform, opened the doors and waited.
Teaching Great Collections of Short Stories:
The Dark Dark by Samantha Hunt
Nine Stories by JD Salinger
After The Quake by Haruki Murakami
Her Body and Other Stories by Carmen Maria Machado are just a few….
Summer Books I loved, 2017
This summer I read some startling poetry—Paschen, Kaschike, and Sinclair, 2 amazing debuts by Clemmons and Cline, Lincoln In The Bardo by George Saunders, a book that tips over the whole concept of a novel into something new, Hunt’s book which speaks to what every woman I know goes through, The Snyder which is a really important little manifesto by a brilliant scholar…
What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons
The Girls by Emma Cline
The Nightlife by Elise Paschen
The Infintesimals by Laura Kaschike
The Answers by Catherine Lacey
Do Not Become Alarmed by Maile Meloy
The Dark Dark by Samantha Hunt
On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder
Abandon Me by Melissa Febos
Cannibal by Safiya Sinclair
Women and Children First Bookstore in Chicago
Panel discussion of best books of the year. Dec. 16, 2016 at 7:30pm
Summer, 2016 Eating Books
Little Red Chairs, Edna O’Brien I had never read her before. I love her style and her depiction of small town Irish life and the psychology of a psychopath dictator.
Homecoming by Yaa Gyasi. With its transparent prose, only the story, characters and emotions remain. A 17th century African village is depicted with amazing historical accuracy that never displays the virtuoso research this must have entailed. A seamless and haunting story of the slave trade and its lasting effects.
Burning Down the House by Jane Mendelsohn The style, overtly lyrical, staccato, at times baroque, and the subject , 21rst century wealth and its demented sources, are captivating. The emotional impact is intense and lingering. I loved it.
Hologram For a King by Dave Eggers. At once, naturalistic and modern in its spare lucid descriptions. The story feels like an allegory about the pitfalls of modernity itself. Very Eggers.
Citizen by Claudia Rankine These poems create a memoir of vitality and depth. New insights startled me on every page about race and the struggle to have a self in a world that can’t see you.
Erratic Facts by Kay Ryan. Crystalline poems given as a gift to my husband from poet, Elise Paschen. I read them first and loved them.
Seven Brief Lectures on Physics by Carlo Ravelli. I knew nothing and now I know something.
The Ten Thousand Things by Julia Pierpont A first novel about infidelity and its ravaging consequences on a family, wrought in stunning, original prose. Episodic, lyrical and expertly paced, the novel traces the effects of the breakup over many years and the complex fallout for the children.
Euphoria by Lily King .A novel about anthropologists their genuine searches, their egos and careers by a skilled novelists. The story is lively, fun and deep.
Lost in The Fun House by John Barth I should have read this in college but didn’t. There is an essential artifice in even the most realistic fiction. His stories echo naturalism but are interspersed with commentary on themselves. This would be a great book to teach as it elucidates elements of fiction as it deconstructs them and entertains.
A Brief History of Vice by Robert Evans. Because its good to know you can have one or two. A really engaging, funny read that lets you forgive yourself and learn how to make mead, a celtic beverage.
Today Will be Different by Maria Semple. Hilarious and so familiar it hurts.
A Group from California Spring
All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr. Reminicsent of The English Patient. (Haven’t finished this one yet.)
Sarah Manguso, Ongoingness. I loved this memoir about keeping a diary simply for its prose. The topic itself sounds deadly and solipsistic but in the right hands it’s fascinating.
Nell Zink, The Wallcreeper. Refreshingly harsh, ex-patriotic, daring—alert, women have sexual feelings and have affairs—and original in style. Despite this, I felt the artifice of a writer forcing herself to make a novel out of vivid strands. Still I’m excited for her next book, Mislaid.
Julie Lythcott Haimes’s, How to Raise an Adult
I read this is 2 sittings amazed by how much a I “over-parent.” Every once in a while a book captures the cultural zeitgeist. This is that book right now.
Brown Girl Dreaming, Jacqueline Woodson. This wildly prolific young-adult writer composed a beautiful autobiography in verse. I was moved to see the way her personal life and the cultural shift in our country around race, from the early to late sixties, meld. Being white, I didn’t personally feel that shift when I was a child. I was moved by seeing the world through her lens.
Crossing to Safety, William Stegner. Uncanny resemblances to writers and academics I know (and we are) although I wondered whether the book defines a moment in history or is perhaps dated.
Atul Gawande, On Being Mortal. This is classic book group fare with ready made—although beautifully written—timely topics for discussion.
Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club – I’m not one to get depressed by reading about sad or difficult topics but I was admittedly laid low by reading this second book about dying so close to the last one on the same topic.
Ian McEwan, The Children Act. I nearly always love an Ian McEwan novel; short, intense, topical, shapely and elegant as ever.
Per Peterson, Out Stealing Horses. Blown away by the simplicity of the prose and then the violence and the pattern of the two throughout.
My Odd List of Recent Favorites:
-Enormous Changes at The Last Minute by Grace Paley. She’s unique–vivid, brutal, syntactically original, voice driven– and always restores my faith in stories.
-The Department of Speculation by Jenny Offil. This is a great book about a modern marriage. I feel you, Jenny Offil.
-The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison. Tight, obsessive (in a good way!) essays.
-Elena Ferrante’s six amazing novels. I read these just as the hype began and I now believe it thoroughly. I’m left wondering why certain works of fiction feel autobiographical. There’s a completely tethered connection to the physical and meta-physical real.
-The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. by Adelle Waldman. I loved to hate Nathaniel P. He’s the reason one can’t marry a male New York writer.
-Infidelities. Poems by Elise Paschen. This is her first book and it is fierce, haunting, laced with resonance and a sense of inevitability that feels close to narrative.
-Lean In by Cheryl Sandberg. I caved and finally read it. Fine, so there was a ghost writer and a researcher but the basic data needed to be revealed…by someone: Inequity between the sexes still persists and she dishes the proof.
More books….
Wild, by Cheryl Strayed
Cheryl Strayed changed her name to “Strayed” when she couldn’t stop straying from her husband; this fact makes her loveably odd—who does that?—and pretentious. Yet because this is a memoir of her life in her twenties, we forgive her. The book’s inviting frame, a memoir about the death of her mother and her decision to hike the Pacific Coast Trail by herself, is, in a way a ruse: the book’s strength is that it is about ordinary youth, its extreme vanity, its foolishness, its grandiosity and despair, its ignorance and bravado and its inevitable stumbling blocks. As much as her childhood poverty, her bereavement, and her hiking distinguish her, the book’s power is in her ordinariness and her willingness, not to boast of her strength in face of adversity (who among us doesn’t face adversity after all?) but to reveal the details of herself that betray a quiet universality: her insatiable hunger after hiking and the delectable first bites of a chocolate bar, the unbelievable thirst she feels and her new passion for Snapple Lemonade, her relatable decision to send herself a brand new black lace bra to wear after a grueling hike and a shower in the hopes of finding someone to undress her and delight in discovering it. These smaller details kept me riveted.
The Silent Wife, by ABA Harrison
I’ve lived in Chicago for ten years and I think The Silent Wife captures the essence of the city more than any book I’ve read: the Ferrari of a successful, self-made man zipping down the cavernous streets of the Loop, the Lakeside aerie of the would-be perfect couple hovering over Michigan Avenue, two best friends digging into beer and burgers at The Drake, and above all, the all-American sexism. The American dream is portrayed as one that is achievable for him and doomed for her. When the silent wife in question, Jodi—dutiful, loyal, culinarily gifted and professional, albeit more devoted to her household–comes to this realization, she crumbles, revealing a world of passion and rage that is wholly human. It’s a wonderful moment for a reader who is close to disbelieving in the wife’s powers of dull containment and then is absolutely fulfilled by her startling dissembling.
Days of Abandonment by, Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante is an incredible writer. The slow incremental stacking of sentences creates a slow burn. The emotion is so real it scorches. I was sobbing as I read this book of a woman’s undoing by her husband’s affair with a younger woman. It sounds cliché, but the power with which she conveys her protagonist’s reactions take it far beyond cliché. We come to understand, truly, what a human betrayal is, why it debilitates, and what are its costs.
Quiet, by Susan Cain
Clearly there aren’t two types of people in the world and many people contain traits of introverts and those of extroverts, the classic labels created by Carl Jung. Cain explores the deeper meanings of these labels and how our culture perhaps devalues the power of introversion. This is the book’s biggest contribution: to point out the incalculable value of creativity, which arises from those who work alone instead of in groups. Introverts are often artists, scientists, thinkers, whose revelations come to them through time and solitude. At times, a reader may feel too much the defensiveness of a true introvert at work, trying, in that conflicted way introverts sometimes have, to assert herself. Cain is a self-avowed introvert and admits struggling for years to learn public speaking. The roots of why she felt compelled to do this, other than for her need to publicize this book, must be in her own self-doubt: An introvert can easily write with no fear of public speaking and with no real need for it (aside from the need for marketing one’s book which today is perhaps a real concern.) Although Cain’s repeated focus on her need to learn public speaking it comes off feeling like a conflicted desire for attention, or, worse, greed. Just when she has reigned me in so forcibly—I am an introvert and my daughter is too—she has to turn me off with her, highly viewed Ted talk!
Despite this perhaps unconscious lack of self-acceptance on her part, I was completely captivated by her descriptions of ordinary American life and its bias towards extroverts in school and the workplace. Equally impressive is her grounding in the work of Kahn, a psychologist who’s experiments with thousands of infants lay the groundwork for a deeper physiological understanding of introversion and extroversion and introversions relationship to sensitivity: highly reactive infants grew up to be introverts while those who were less responsive to the same stimuli grew up to be extroverts. Highly sensitive people, require less stimulation and less sensitive people require more external stimulation. It’s a fascinating study that Cain elucidates well and makes Quiet worth reading.
Henderson The Rain King, by Saul Bellow
I’m a writer and an aesthete and I love language so much as to forgive the giants of American literature, Updike, Roth Cheever, their sexism. But I can’t forgive Bellow. Where the others elucidate sexism as a part of their culture and time, and are able to transcend it and discover the basic humanity in their characters, Bellow can’t. I loved Henderson The Rain King when I read it as a teenager for its imaginative flight, its sentences and descriptions and its wonderful conceit—Henderson abandons ordinary life and goes to Africa to start anew—but couldn’t love it this time as much as a I’d hoped too. Forgive me, Chicago and literati but Bellow, who strips his female characters of any shred of humanity, making them into grotesque animals, more foreign and beast-like than any animals he encounters in Africa, is not great.