2025 #1 Call Us What We Carry (Gorman)

 Happy New Year. This might have been the perfect book to pick back up at the end of 2024 and to finish in these early days of 2025. I also want to note that I am partaking in two challenges this year: a 25 for 25 Follow the Leader Challenge (technically this means my next book title should start with the letter Y) and a "serious about series" challenge wherein I read one book a month that is a sequel, or part of series. I'm also dedicating 2025 year to working with my stash. I own far too many unread books.

Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

On the front flap of the dust jacket, the book reads:

This book is a message in a bottle.
This book is a letter.
This book does not let up.

This book does NOT let up, indeed. "What place have we in our histories except the present?" (123) Gorman asks in "War: What, Is it Good?" The book is a memoir, largely of the pandemic. But to read it is remember that it was more than Covid-19. It was a reckoning. It was a nightmare and a dream. It tested all of us, not all in the same ways.

Gorman's gifts with language are woven through poems that rhyme and poems that don't, pieces of prose by Corporal Roy Plummer (1896-1966) interspersed with Gorman's verse, a list of scenes to make up a filmic "Monomyth" that narrates the crumbling of normalcy beginning in December 2019 in Wuhan, through apocalyptic brushfires in Australia, through the murder of George Floyd, ultimately to emerge/submerge into the Unordinary World:

"We are not all heroes, but we are all at least human. This is not a
closing, but an opening, a widening--not a yawn but a scream, a
poem sung. What will we admit of & into ourselves. There is no such thing as "all over" and "all done". (191)

The short poem "Anonymous" on 180 features white letters on a black mask, an emblem so charged with meaning in this Unordinary World.

The title of the collection, Call Us What We Carry, truly captures a sense of the book as a whole, and is not just a reference to the penultimate poem "What We Carry" nor the poem "Call Us" (34) wherein we find that exact line. Naming and carrying both feature in much of the work, as does navigation and light.

There are seven sections of the book: Requiem, What a Piece of Wreck is Man, Earth Eyes, Memoria, Atonement, Fury & Faith, and Resolution. These titles become more like beacons as you read through the collection and pick up the various threads. For example, in the poem "Lucent", which is the first piece of "Earth Eyes", the meditation on lumen, lucent..."Our requiem as raptus" (60) reminds us of the role of light in a requiem Mass (luceat eis, lux aeterna) but also how "perhaps it is we who make/Falsities of luminscence--" (61).

In the middle of the book, in a piece called "Pre-Memory", Gorman reminds us:
"Storytelling is the way that unarticulated memory becomes art, becomes artifact, becomes fact, becomes felt again, becomes free."

Yes, the book does not let up, nor should it. We need to feel again. We need to be free.

View all my reviews

Follow the Leader Challenge 2025 1B -->Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

2024 #33: Mrs. Death Misses Death (Godden)

 

Mrs Death Misses Death by Salena Godden
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There is a reason I characterize this as both poetry and fiction. I'll borrow from Sara Collins who described the work this way in her review in The Guardian:
The effect is to produce a collage of speech and speechlessness, a story that sometimes slips away from you even while you are reading it, becoming a memento mori in form as well as content. In other words, it’s exactly the sort of thing you expect when a poet writes a novel, and exactly the sort of thing you’ll devour if you like huge helpings of experimentation with your fiction..

Experimental, yes. I occasionally subject myself to the whimsy of algorithms and the title was captivating, so I bought it as an audiobook without reading anything about it. I had assumed it was going to be a cutesy mystery of some sort, but evidently the algorithms were feeling my one reading of Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse more than my plentiful cozy mysteries. From the outset, it is fairly clear this is not a standard novel. Godden is fond of litany as a poetic form, and I felt relieved I was hearing her read it, rather than reading the litanies in print myself. This is a book where it is very much an advantage to hear Godden's reading because she illuminates her own poetry in a way that few might receive it on the page.

To be fair to the algorithmic gods, it does remind me of Woolf's To the Lighthouse as there is only a modicum of actual, traditional "plot" and it is more about musings on death, and even more so, life. We don't get a tidy explanation for Wolf Willeford's mental state vis-a-vis their conversations with Mrs. Death, so the latter straddles allegorical figure and actual character. One might argue drawing conclusions about that aren't very important, but I suspect most readers will find themselves curious, although no doubt carried along by the talking desk and sessions with the therapist. There is plenty of biting social commentary, and the moments of wit pop out of a fabric that is woven from some very dark and dense cloth.

Quote: "Since you were here and sh*t, you might as well give a sh*t."

There was one sentence that I wanted to be the end of the book:
"It's a very simple question that life asks: will you walk with me?"

Godden doesn't end it there, and one can see why, but even after reading the "diary entries" that follow, it was that line that stayed with me the most. It is a helpful question--hopeful, even. But I cannot wholesale give this book a description of "hopeful." It is a longform poem (mostly) that digs into questions of gender and existence in a fresh way that is both alarming and familiar.

View all my reviews

2023 #21: Life On Mars (Smith)

 

Life on Mars: Poems by Tracy K. Smith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The title of this collection, Life on Mars seems almost tongue-in-cheek as the collection is VERY much about life here on earth, in a very visceral, beautiful, and sometimes intensely difficult, way. Poems like "Everything That Ever Was" manage to dance with the universe without overly lofty ambition, keeping our feet on the ground. "The Universe as Primal Scream" marries biblical storytelling with the everyday tedium of our existence. Occasionally Smith packs a huge punch with just a few words (your mileage will vary, based on personal experiences). When I read, "Tonight, I'm at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. I don't know where I end" ("They May Love All That He Has Chosen and Hate All That He Has Rejected"), I was transported to that exact state of being. Prior to reading the collection I had been at an event where Tracy K. Smith spoke about her father, and many of the poems in this collection revealed much about that relationship--in particular the one dedicated to his memory, "The Speed of Belief".

At that same event, Smith said, "When you read a poem you become humble." In humility there is great wisdom and beauty and it is woven throughout this wonderful collection.

View all my reviews

2019 #12: What W.H. Auden Can Do For You (McCall Smith)

What W. H. Auden Can Do for You by Alexander McCall Smith


It is true that this book is somewhat self-indulgent, but if you are one of those people, like me, who enjoys what one might call conversational erudition, this book is a fantasy fulfilled. In reading McCall
Smith's book, we imagine ourselves not in a classroom, but sitting in the Russian Tea Room, as the author did with Edward Mendelson (108-11). This evokes an older mode of teaching, and reminded me specifically of my Doktorvater, who could recall specific measures of a Brahms intermezzo, the structure of a medieval motet, or the specific page of a citation in an issue of the Journal of the American Musicological Society with authority based, first and foremost, in his pure love of--and engagement with--music. This is truly the "life of the mind," when we move past the hierarchical corporate machine of academia. That said, the book rests in privilege, without doubt -- both in the fact it exists, and that it banks on a readership of well-established fans. But I've been astonished by some of the criticism claiming that McCall Smith is not a good enough author to deserve to write a book on Auden. These same reviews call him out for his "ego" in producing the book in the first place. There's a quiet irony here which I won't harp on, to avoid a review of a review. For me, McCall Smith's stream-of-consciouness sidebars are refreshing and he wrote this book in the way that I read most books. If you are looking for an academic tome about Auden, or a biography-- this isn't it, which the author tells us on p. 3:

This small book does not purport to be a work of criticism. It does not claim to shed new light on a body of work that has already been extensively examined. It is simply an attempt to share an enthusiasm with others who may not have yet discovered, or may not have given much thought to the work of Wystan Hugh Auden.

Those familiar with McCall Smith's Isabel Dalhousie series may take extra delight in this volume, particularly in that the real Edward Mendelson, whom McCall Smith extolls as "no better guardian and exponent of [Auden's] work," makes an appearance in several of those novels.

2019 #6 Blue Horses (Mary Oliver)

Blue Horses by Mary Oliver
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Oliver's mixture of spirituality and pragmatism, undergirded by an occasionally sardonic wit, is truly a gift. Her reverence for nature (see "I'm not the River") is balanced by a solid self-reflection that blossoms into insight. Her best poems are those that are unapologetically human ("On Meditating, Sort of") and those that interweave whimsy and depth ("Watering the Stones"). Oliver writes "I don't want to be demure or respectable./I was that way, asleep, for years." This collection of poems invites us to wake up, and see with "new eyes," as Proust might have it.

2018 #2: Citzen: An American Lyric (Rankine)

Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I don't think anything I write here will adequately convey the torrent of feelings and thoughts that are stirring inside me. This is art. This is truth. This is pain.

Rankine quotes James Baldwin: "The purpose of art...is to lay bare the questions hidden by the answers." (115) Indeed, this is an essay about answers. Answers fueled by imagination. And while that sounds grand and we usually consider imagination a positive trait, consider these three lines:

because white men can't
police their imagination
black people are dying

If that bothers you, don't read this book. No, on the other hand, read this book. Read about what it is to be invisible. To be unheard. It is an essaypoem on past, present, and future...understanding that the triumvirate we use to keep time manageable is really just a construct that fails to acknowledge our own responsibility to those three aspects of our existence.

"Memory is a tough place," Rankine writes. "You were there. If this is not the truth, it is also not a lie." (64)

Speaking truth to power is what Rankine does here. A colleague described this as a "quick read." It is not. It is a book that deserves deep attention to every word--not just the words themselves, but to see how Rankine has crafted her thoughts and bared them for all to see. This is an honest and important essay that casts our condition as citizens into high relief. It isn't pretty, but the song needs to be heard and the story needs to be told, until we all learn how to listen.