Eula Biss, _Having and Being Had_

 I AM WONDERING about the number of emerging major American prose writers who started out as poets. Eula Biss, for one, but also Patricia Lockwood, Cathy Park Hong, Anne Boyer, Lucy Ives. Did this all start with Mary Karr? Kathleen Norris? Are any of these people going to go back to writing poetry? Karr and Norris did, to an extent, but poetry for them seemed to become something of a sideline. I can't blame people for wanting to write books that sell better than volumes of poetry, I guess. Still, I feel a pang of regret. 

If we might describe Anne Boyer's The Undying as an antagonistic assessment of capitalism through the lens of cancer, we might describe Having and Being Had as an antagonistic assessment of capitalism through the lens of real estate.  Married with a young son, Biss and her husband find themselves with an altogether understandable desire to own a house, but in multiple and unfolding ways the cost of owning a house includes complicity in the meshes of an economy organized around profit and exploitation. 

The book consists of usually quite short essays, well-informed, taut, brushed with a sort of satirical lyricism, and organized into four sections: "Consumption," "Work," "Investment," and "Accounting." As with The Undying, the surface tone tends to be cool, dry, and rational, but there is molten lava flowing underground, an anger at how our economic system coerces us.

I was particularly struck by Biss's analysis of "work." For her, her work--the thing she lives to do--is her writing. For all but her friends, though, her work is what she does to earn the larger and steadier part of her income--her teaching. For her, her teaching is what she does in order to have opportunity to do her writing--that is she works in order to do her work. And that perhaps answers my question about poets turning to the writing of prose.