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.