Richard Siken, _I Do Know Some Things_

 I HAD READ and heard that this book is good, but I was still taken by surprise. It is...jaw-dropping good. 

I thought very well of Siken's first book, Crush, which twenty years on from its publication stands as a contemporary classic, if we are ready to concede there is such a thing.  I don't know why I never picked up his second collection, War of the Foxes, published ten years after Crush. Checking my records, in 2015 I seem to have been reading Lisa Robertson, Dawn Lundy Martin, Susan Howe, Mary Hickman, and Patricia Lockwood, so I was not wasting my time...still, looking back, I feel like scolding myself. I hope to rectify the omission soon.

As you probably know, Siken suffered a debilitating stroke in 2019. Somehow, besides re-learning how to talk and walk, he re-learned how to write poems. 

In many respects, these poems feel different from the poems of Crush. Siken's earlier poems performed a variety of feats of legerdemain with lineation and sentence construction while orbiting various men over whom Siken was obsessing. The poems of I Do Know Some Things are printed as prose, with no special lineation at all, and the sentences tend to be short. Most of the poems are about his own situation or those of family members, especially his father, who died in the period when Siken was writing these poems.

Unchanged, though, are Siken's audacity, powers of invention, and ability to land some startling leaps.

"I tried to say something nice to the nurse. I introduced myself. She said we had already met. I thought she was moody until I realized she was several nurses, each working their own shift. To them I was Hamlet in a  long line of Hamlets. My problems were unimpressive and not unique."

Some leaps launch him into the surreal, as in "Fear":

"I am jet fuel and six miles long. I am bad business. I make the rooms grow smaller. Underneath my shirt is another shirt and under that the cloudbanks clang their worksong. They pitch their weight in droves."

But I was most amazed by "Sentence" in the book's seventh and final section, where Siken reflects on his own practices, explaining how lines differ from sentences and then dropping a sentence whose length and elaboration David Foster Wallace might envy.

The backstory of this collection, compelling as it is, is overshadowed by the poems themselves.

_The Letters of Max Beerbohm, 1892-1956_, Rupert Hart-Davis

MAX DOES NOT give away a lot about himself here. Although editor Hart-Davis believes one of the letters to Florence Kahn, whom Max later married, suggests that Max was asexual (and perhaps it does),  Max is not one for confessions and revelations, generally. Charm, perfect manners, inimitable style, piercing eye--the reader does get all that, and a generous helping of reproduced drawings as well. 

I can hardly explain to myself why Max always dazzles me. He's one of the great caricaturists, I'd say, and this collection of letters makes clear that a lot of his caricatures were of friends...and that they stayed friends. Perhaps because however unflattering the caricatures are, one never senses malice.

And then there are those Max sentences. Perfectly clear, perfectly turned, yet still able to come around from behind and startle you. 

And different as I am from Max, unlike him in so many ways, I enjoyed finding out that we both admire the prose of Lytton Strachey.

Sybille Bedford, _The Trial of Lady Chatterly's Lover_

 THE 1960s REALLY were the golden age of long-form journalism. Rachel Carson. Tom Wolfe. Truman Capote. Norman Mailer. Gay Talese. And Sybille Bedford, who is perhaps not as famous as the others but whose account of The Crown v. Penguin Books, the trial over the legality of publishing D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover, was published by Esquire magazine in 1961 and is available as an 80-page book from Daunt Books.

On the cover of the Daunt version, the words "Would YOU let your WIFE read this BOOK?" are much larger and more prominent than the book's actual title--a canny design call, since Bedford spends less time on what is or isn't obscene about Lawrence's novel than on the prosecutor's assumption that upper- and upper-middle-class men need to be in charge of what women and the laboring classes read. 

Chief prosecutor Mervyn Griffith-Jones clearly does not think reading the book would do him or men like him any harm, but he keeps asking the large cast of writers and academics Penguin call to testify to the book's artistic value whether they would let their wives and servants read it. 

We remember this trial mainly for legalizing the literary depiction of human sexuality--fair enough--but what Bedford also brings out is the overturning of the idea that the upper classes knew what was best for everybody. And that was a big part of the 1960s, too.

Sigrid Nunez, _The Vulnerables_

 THE NOVEL BEGINS, "It was an uncertain spring"--just like that, within quotation marks, because Nunez's novel's first sentence quotes the  first sentence of another novel, Virginia Woolf's The Years. Like The Years, The Vulnerables is a hybrid of fiction and non-fiction, of novelistic narrative and essay, of invention and reflection on what actually happened.

The novel mainly concerns how the unnamed narrator, whose circumstances (age, profession, residence) are quite a bit like Nunez's own, managed during the COVID lockdown of 2020. She is parrot-sitting and living in the New York apartment of a friend who is about to give birth in the Bay Area; she is also sharing that apartment with the son of other friends of that friend, a young man who has dropped out of college during his final semester before graduation and is on the outs with his parents.

The Vulnerables does not have a lot of plot--not much intrigue, conflict, suspense, tension, resolution, etc.--although the narrator's relationships with the parrot (Eureka) and the young man (Vetch [ha!]) do develop in interesting ways. Much of the novel, though, has to do with the chance encounters, ruminations, memories of the narrator during those months.

What exactly makes the novel so compelling, then? Why did I enjoy it so much? Why did I find it hard  to put down? I cannot say. Nunez ignores about every maxim one would receive in a fiction workshop (including, as she notes, the recommendation that one not begin a novel by talking about the weather), but for some reason, The Vulnerables is more a delight than almost any of the novels that do adhere to those maxims.

If I had to pin down a reason, I would say The Vulnerables gracefully engages the question of the relation of the written to the real. So ponderous a question, but Nunez spins it like a frisbee and sends it aloft to you. Catch it if you can, or simply enjoy its flight.

Naomi Baker, _Voices of Thunder: Radical Religious Women of the Seventeenth Century_

THE SUBTITLE WOULD be a little more on-point if it were "Radical Religious Women of 17th Century England," but this is an excellent book. I might not have come across it save for Erin Maglaque's review in NYRB, so a tip of the Puritan black felt hat to her.

The middle decades of the 17th century were a time of upheaval all over Europe and certainly in England:  the civil war, the deposition and execution of a king, the founding of a new form of government, the radical remaking of the Church of England, and a brief but intoxicating period when all sorts of books that would never have made it past the royal censorship were being published. Some of the men who took advantage of this opportunity to publish wildly original theological and political ideas, like Gerrard Winstanley and Abiezer Coppe, began getting some attention in the 20th century. Only more recently have the women who published similarly bold pronouncements and proclamations attracted historians' notice. Baker's book brings some of these women vividly to life for the general reader.

None of the dozen-plus women Baker introduces us to is a well-known name to anyone but scholars of the period, but Rose Thurgood, Sarah Wight, Anna Trapnel, Hester Biddle, Mary Fisher, and Jane Lead (to name a few whose stories I found especially interesting) were all remarkable figures. Simply by publishing their experiences and speculations, they were upending hierarchies; they were (a) women, (b) not university-educated, (c) not ordained ministers, and (d) not from the upper classes, and therefore utterly without any of the qualifications or standing that the 17th century would have regarded as conferring authority. That didn't stop them, though. And it turns out what they had to say--about the church, about Christianity, about religion's role in society, and about what is Godly and what is not--still strikes a few chords. Consider this from Jane Lead: "Dive into your own celestiality and see with what matter of spirits you are endued, for in them the powers do entirely lie for transformation." (William Blake's parents may have known Lead's works.)

I wanted immediately to find some of these texts for myself, but most have been out of print for hundreds of years. One can turn up things online--but what I really would like to see is a nice fat Penguin, edited by Baker herself, with choice excerpts from all of these writers. (I have to say that what I found online would benefit from careful editing.) How about it, Penguin?

Chelsey Minnis, _Opera Fever_

 OPERA FEVER READS much like Part Two of Minnis's 2018 collection, Baby, I Don't Care. The book's design is again by Jeff Clark, which accounts to some degree for the feeling of continuity, but the sense that is one reading a continuation of the same book comes more from the recurring poetic form (ten lines per page, in two groups of five lines each), and most of all from a similarity of voice, with frequent leaps and veerings from one line to the next and a second person addressed as "Darling." 

Also like its predecessor, the book evokes Golden Age Hollywood. The frequent "Darling"s land with a certain Tallulah Bankhead drawl, and the imagery put me in mind of what Jack Smith might have come up with if he edited his favorites bits of Now, Voyager together with his favorite bits of The Big Sleep.

There are differences, too, but subtle ones. The poems in Baby, I Don't Care frequently address someone as "baby," but that familiarity is avoided in Opera Fever. Ellipses at the ends of lines, a salient feature of Poemland (2009), disappeared from Baby, I Don't Care but appear often in Opera Fever. (I'm not sure what to make of this, but the ellipses in Opera Fever are often just two periods rather than the conventional three.)

I don't know how to feel about the very marked similarity between the two books. Generally, I like poets who change it up some from collection to collection. Victoria Chang and Ariana Reines could serve as examples. Jorie Graham has sometimes settled into similar forms for two or three consecutive collections, but over the course of her career has changed things up quite a few times. 

On the other hand, other poets succeed by finding their thing and sticking with it. Merwin from The Lice on, say, or Ashbery in his last four or five volumes, or Paul Muldoon in his last four or five. As a friend observed, think of Mark Rothko or Agnes Martin. They found their thing and stuck with it, with spectacular results. 

Minnis is far too canny a poet for me to conclude that she is simply in a rut. If she is in a rut, she is deliberately in one, and we her readers need to roll with it.

Alexandra Kleeman, _Something New Under the Sun_

AN EXCERPT FROM this appeared in The Baffler and caught my interest, so I picked it up. It's very good, but not quite what I expected.

The initial premise, very much to the foreground in the excerpt: our main point-of-view character, Patrick Hamlin, is a NYC-based literary novelist who has not quite broken through. A couple of film producers have, however, bought the film rights to his Hamlet-inspired novel, Elsinore Lane, and he has come out to Hollywood to serve as a production assistant and, he expects, to offer invaluable advice to the production, being the author of the source material.  And to maybe give his career a boost, too.

However, it turns out that being a "production assistant" mainly amounts to transporting objects and people, and the producers are less interested in Patrick's novel than in whipping up a CGI-enhanced ghost story to reboot the career of former child star Cassidy Carter, who has had a difficult, paparazzo-ridden transition to adulthood, including a few public scenes, á la Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan. 

Meanwhile, Patrick's wife Alison, anxious and conscience-stricken by the approaching climate catastrophe, has taken herself and their daughter to an all-but-inaccessible experimental community in far upstate New York.

Interesting set-up. Can Patrick save his novel from Hollywood exploitation and save his family in the bargain?

If Something New Under the Sun were a film, both questions would be answered in the affirmative, but it is actually an ingenious satirical novel. 

Patrick's production assistant duties mainly involve transporting of Cassidy Carter, who turns out (a) to be a lot more interesting, in Kleeman's hands, than Patrick is and (b) to actually possess in real life the sleuthing skills of the character she played for several seasons on television, teenage detective Kassi Keene. Cassidy comes across a California scam of Pynchonian dimensions in the mass marketing of WAT-R, a manufactured water-substitute that is making billions for somebody but unfortunately inducing dementia in its consumers.

Something New Under the Sun, however, does not turn into a Pynchonian noir. The enigmatic closing chapter takes our two main characters out to the desert, where they encounter a grey-suited figure and...meet their ends? I don't know. Patrick and Alison's daughter Nora is going to be all right, I imagine, as she possesses visionary powers, but everyone else seems to be sliding into the chasm.

So, not a book for folks who like loose ends tied up, but Kleeman's satirical insight is sharp and the novel has at least one unforgettable character in Cassidy Carter. Kleeman also has a gift for description--a gift not in high demand these days, perhaps. As Maureen McLane put it in a poem in the most recent LRB, 

description is decadent and passé

some say         some say

 And yes, description can get tedious, but try this: "As Cassidy follows the curve of the road out to the desert, the valley fades into the long, brown flats of Riverside, adorned by a sarcastic smattering of palm trees. Out past the highway, terra-cotta-shingled houses huddle around twisting inner streets and culs-de-sac. [...] In the backyard of a sand-colored ranch, pale concrete surrounds an empty swimming pool, punctured by short, tough plants with tiny blue flowers growing through cracks in the surface."