Roger Reeves, _Best Barbarian_

I WAS ALREADY planning to read this, but Reeves's essay in Granta, "Through the Smoke, Through the Veil, Through the Wind," bumped it up to the top of my list. As the variety of honors it has received suggests, it is excellent.

As in Zadie Smith's successful re-boots of Forster (On Beauty), Chaucer (The Wife of Willesden), and Dickens (The Fraud), Reeves engages deftly with some Anglo canonical influences (T. S. Eliot in "Poem, in an Old Language," Yeats in "As a Child of North America," Beowulf in a couple of poems about Grendel) while foregrounding a Black cultural inheritance (Phyllis Wheatley, Langston Hughes, John and Alice Coltrane, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Jericho Brown). It's a heady brew, but he drinks it down and does not even wobble.

Take, for instance, the first of the two long poems at the book's center, "Domestic Violence," which appropriates the trip to the underworld in Book VI of Virgil's Aeneid as well as Pound's and Eliot's appropriations of that topos, then pivots on the astonishing datum that the Louis Till who figures in Pound's Pisan Cantos was the father of Emmett Till ("Yes, that Emmett Till," Reeves writes in the notes), taking the poem suddenly into the gravest urgencies of the present.

(I'm still trying to figure out whether the second long poem in the middle of the book, "Something about John Coltrane," is in dialogue with Michael S. Harper's "Dear John, Dear Coltrane." It might be...but I'm not sure.) 

Recurring images--field, tree, blood--give the book a mysterious unity. Those images may be connected--seem to be connected, in a way I don't understand-- to the most intimate poems of the book, those about the death of his father and the birth of his daughter, especially "After Death."

Elizabeth Willis, _Alive: New and Selected Poems_

 I DO NOT remember why I bought this. I don’t think I saw any reviews…I don’t think anyone recommended it…I don’t think I saw some reference to her work somewhere…it may have just been that  this collection was published by NYRB Books. Whatever it was, it worked out. This is a great collection.

Quite a few of the poems, perhaps as many as half of them, are prose poems and brilliant examples of the genre. (I checked David Lehmann’s anthology of prose poems to see whether I had come across her work there, but no.) They have a way of matter-of-factly dropping a non sequitur in a deadpan, nothing-to-see-here way that reminds me of James Tate.

What struck me most, though, is a quality that I associate with some Emily Dickinson and Lorine Niedecker poems, having to do with the poem not needing to be seen/read/noticed as a poem to be a poem. Most poems, nearly all I think, want you to see them, want to register on readers’ consciousnesses as poems. A lot of Willis’s poems seem more self-sufficient than that, almost as if they do not need to be read and recognized as poems to be poems. We could call this a kind of modesty or self-effacement, but it could be a kind of supreme indifference too, the absence of any need of readerly approval. I find it very attractive, somehow.

The final poem, “About the Author,” seems to be a witty twist on just this point, playing as it does on the idea that if we readers see the poems as poems we will want to know about the source of the poems, the poet, assuming her to be remarkable and interesting and wise. And even though I repeatedly found myself thinking, as I read Alive, that Willis is interesting and remarkable and wise, “About the Author” seemed a well-dropped reminder that whether I came to such conclusions or not, her poems were poems. 

George Scialabba, _What Are Intellectuals Good For?_

 AMONG THE ADVANTAGES of retirement is getting around to the years’ worth (decades’ worth?) of books that I have been wanting to read but had no immediate, pressing need to read, such as this collection of articles and reviews by George Scialabba.

I figured the book was a good bet because I have been enjoying Scialabba’s reviews for years—always crisply written, well-informed, and thought-provoking. 

The earliest collected here is a piece on Leszek Kolakowski, Richard Rorty, and Alasdair MacIntyre that appeared in the Village Voice in 1983, the most recent a valedictory piece on Christopher Hitchens that appeared in n+1 in 2005–that is, a farewell not to Hitchens the person, who died in 2011, but to Hitchens the writer one looks forward to reading, given his support of the war in Iraq. (Hitchens was still alive when this collection was published in 2009.)

I am on Scialabba’s wavelength in several ways. I have a wide, deep soft spot for the New York intellectuals of the post-WW II era, and so does he; the deeply appreciative piece on Dwight MacDonald was a highlight of the book for me, and I also relished those on Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe. Though not a conservative, I am always interested in what an intelligent and articulate argument for conservative ideas looks like, and so is he, hence the serious appraisals here of John Gray, Allan Bloom, and William F. Buckley.

We even dislike some of the same things. When Scialabba calls Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism “an inexhaustibly tiresome book,” all I can say is amen. (I know he’s important—but one can be important and inexhaustibly tiresome in the bargain.)

I don’t like Christopher Lasch as much as Scialabba does, but reading Scialabba makes me think I should like Lasch more than I do. I like Isaiah Berlin a lot more than Scialabba does, but his point about the cold water Berlin throws on any kind of aspirational thinking sounds right. We are of one mind, I was happy to see, on Rorty.

He’s a national treasure, I think. I haven’t seen much by him lately, but I trust he’s still reading and writing.

Matthew Desmond, _Poverty, by America_

I'VE OFTEN HEARD that Michael Harrington's The Other Americans (1963), an account of the persistence of poverty during the country's post-war growth boom, was read by enough of the right people at the right time to influence the Great Society programs that came along a couple of years later. I earnestly hope something like that happens with Desmond's book. An astonishing synthesis of passion and precision, it could change the policy landscape...if heeded.

Most of us too quickly assume that the poverty of the poor has to do with their own shortcomings--things they failed to do, like finish high school, or things they did that they ought not to have done, like tumble into substance abuse. Desmond makes it clear that the poverty of the poor has much more to do with advantages maintained by the rich--employers who benefit from keeping wages low, property owners who benefit from keeping rents high. Add in the broad American reluctance to support public goods (e.g., strong public schools, adequate public health care, subsidized childcare) and you see why the poverty rate hardly budges (except during COVID--but that influx of support for public goods ended all too soon).

Desmond underlines that despite the Nazarene's line that "the poor are with you always," poverty is an eradicable problem if we have the will. Raise the minimum wage, foster low-income housing in all neighborhoods, collect all the taxes that are owed but not paid, and the landscape could change in a generation.

We can all think of several reasons why that may not happen--racism, lingering pseudo-Calvinistic notions, the disproportionate political power of the wealthy--but the key and possibly revolutionary idea is that it is not impossible. We could, if enough of us so chose and worked towards it, bring about the end of poverty as we know it.

Elaine Equi, guest editor, and David Lehman, series editor, _The Best American Poetry, 2023_

 AMONG THE RIPPLES of retirement is that I read the 2023 BAP well before the 2024 BAP was published. It's a new day.

Some guest editors make a point of very broad-church, stylistically diverse selections (Denise Duhamel in 2013, for example), but more of them, I would say, provide a narrower stylistic spectrum fairly close to that of their own work (the Hirsch-Trethewey-Gioia run of 2016-18, for example). Elaine Equi is more in the latter camp.

Equi's introduction spells out as plainly as possible that she likes poems that are short, humorous, and witty. The 2023 BAP thus has a pronounced penchant for the short, humorous, and witty, which makes for a brisk read, but can sometimes leave the impression that you are reading a collection by a single poet rather than an anthology. 

I like short poems, too, but a few longer ones would have been welcome. The book's longest poem, Dunya Mikhail's "Tablets VI," turns out to be 24 very short poems. 

Not that many unfamiliar names this time, but some really nice things by familiar ones: a Timothy Donnelly "chariot" that was not in Chariot, great poems I had not seen before from Victoria Chang, Matthew Zapruder, Cole Swenson, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Diane Seuss. And, happily, a poem by Elizabeth Willis--has she been in BAP before? She must have been, but I know she hasn't appeared frequently. 

Michelle Tea, _Black Wave_

 BROADLY, BLACK WAVE  (2016) aligns with earlier Tea memoirs The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America and Valencia. The voice and ethos are the same as in those books, and the setting in the first part of the book is the San Francisco of Valencia but a few years later; the second and slightly longer section is set after a move to Los Angeles. 

Black Wave leans into fiction somewhat more, I’m guessing, than the other two books. A few episodes seem more fanciful than actual, such as a passionate afternoon with movie star Matt Dillon, and the book sometimes signals its own fictiveness, as when Tea acknowledges, “In reality, Quinn and Michelle weren’t scheduled to meet one another for over a decade,” or when Tea notes that a character named Lu insisted upon being removed from the book after “a tremendous fight in front of the beverage table at a party.” But the fictiveness of Black Wave is most dramatically apparent when the world ends in 2001.

But then again, how fictional is that? It is true enough that after 9/11, it seemed that a great many things did actually end, never to return, that some things that had mattered a great deal seemed suddenly trivial, that things that had never demanded attention suddenly exploded into salience. It’s a genius move, actually. Tea captures more of the actual strangeness of the era with this surprising device than higher profile efforts by Jonathan Safran Foer and Don DeLillo managed. 

I particularly wanted to read this because Maggie Nelson praised its representation of substance use problems in On Freedom. I second the motion. Tea does not romanticize her descent into dependence, for which this reader was grateful, but she does not wax lyrical about her getting sober, either, which is the particular temptation of books about that difficult process. 

Sarah Thankam Mathews, _All This Could Be Different_

THE NOVEL'S FIRST-PERSON narrator, Sneha (she has a last name, but I can't find it), was born in India but raised in the USA. Her parents have returned to India, but she stayed to complete a bachelor's degree and now has a promising career despite the sluggishness of the economy (circa 2012-13) in a new town (Milwaukee). She has bonded with a lively group of friends from college and some new ones, including the slightly older Marina, with whom she has commenced a promising love affair.

So far, so Jhumpa Lahiri...and indeed Sneha's undergraduate coursework included reading Interpreter of Maladies, Mathews cannily tipping us off that she knows her novel is part of an emerging body of fiction about the South Asian immigrant experience in the contemporary United States.

Things start to go wrong for Sneha. Her boss somehow never gets around to paying her. The property manager at her apartment house is a jangling barbed-wire ball of hostility. Marina has a drinking problem. Her parents back in India are trying to find a husband for her. Over a few months, the omni-competent, super-achieving Sneha becomes anxious and depressed, is living on ramen, and finds herself unable to reach out either to her friends or to her family.

Mathews makes Sneha's year-of-the-wheels-coming-off all too plausible. You can taste that ramen, smell those unwashed dishes in the sink. The inevitable collapse occurs--and, mercifully, friends and family pull through. The threat of a suit for wage theft gets her boss to pay up. Sneha gets a new job and a new place to live and works on a reconciliation with Marina. She comes out to her parents, and they come around. Whew.

The last of the novel's four sections is set about ten years later--that is, about when the book was published, 2023. Sneha is back in Milwaukee (she has moved to D.C.) for a wedding, and is looking back at the chaos of ten years before from an altogether more grounded perspective. Her maturity was hard-won, but she did achieve it. Not that her loife is perfect, but she has come through.

Quite a satisfying novel, really, and it's Mathews's first. She is worth keeping an eye on.

Alejandro Zambra, _Ways of Going Home_, trans. Megan McDowell

 INTERESTING STRUCTURE HERE. In first section of this four-section novel, the Chilean narrator recalls interaction he had with one of the neighbor families, especially one of the daughters, when he was about ten. The neighbor family is under some stress; the father is wanted by the Pinochet government and is living under an assumed identity. 

In the third section, the narrator meets up with the daughter again about twenty years later, not having seen her in the interim. They have an affair, but it’s hard to tell how enduring it will turn out to be.

In the novel’s second and fourth sections, the narrator is a novelist—the author, indeed, of the first and third parts. However, he is stuck with the novel and his marriage has come apart. 

We have reasons to think that the writer who narrates the second and fourth sections based the narrator of the first  and third sections on himself. For instance, the novelist’s mother reads the same books and makes some of the same observations as the mother of the narrator in the novel-within-the-novel. 

Does that mean that Eme (the ex-wife of sections 2 & 4) is based on Claudia (the neighbor girl of section 1 re-encountered years later in section 3)? And what would that mean? 

I’m not sure. The novel does, however, seem to be about an inherited trauma—the generation that came after the Pinochet coup (Zambra was born two years after it happened) but whose lives grew up around the catastrophe their parents lived through, their lives shaped by a catastrophe they did not remember and would not even get an account of until they were adults.