John Philip Newell, _The Great Search: Turning to Earth and Soul in the Quest for Healing and Home_

JOHN PHILIP NEWELL is a former clergyman in the Church of Scotland (he "let go" of his ordination a while ago, as he says in his introduction), and the search named in his title is for a spiritual movement that can provide the wisdom, energy, and inspiration needed to act on climate change.

As he mentions at points throughout the book, a lot of traditional Christian teaching will not be helpful toward this end: the doctrine of original sin and fussing about the ontological status of Jesus of Nazareth, for instance. Insisting on the duality of spirit and matter will cause problems as well; one of his chief recurring ideas is that he need to think of the Earth and the natural world as being as ensouled as we are. The Golden Rule should extend not just to our human neighbors, but to our animal and plant neighbors as well, the whole of the environment.

Most of the book is devoted to discussions of nine figures from several traditions whose ideas could contribute to the Earth-focused spiritual movement: Thomas Berry, Nan Shepherd, Martin  Buber, Carl Jung, Julian of Norwich, Jalaluddin Rumi, Rabindranath Tagore, Etty Hillesum, and Edwin Muir. The friend who lent me  this book likely had in mind my attachment to Julian, and what Newell says about her resonated with me. All nine chapters were illuminating, especially those devoted to people I knew little about (Hillesum, Muir, Berry, Shepherd).

One surprise: American indigeneous spirituality seems obviously well-suited to Newell's search, but he does not mention it. As much as he gets around--he mentions being at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico--he surely knows about it...but not a word. I hope someone hands him a copy of Jerome Rothenberg;'s anthology Technicians of the Sacred soon, and that he writes about it.

David Foster Wallace, _Both Flesh and Not_

BOTH FLESH AND Not collects essays, articles, and reviews by Wallace that did not appear in either of his essay collections, A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again (1997) and Consider the Lobster (2005). I bought it in December of 2012, not long after it came out, but I have put off reading it for (brief pause for arithmetic) almost fourteen years because even though I knew I would enjoy it, I also knew it would sadden me to know that this is it, there’s no more.  That’s exactly what happened.

The title essay, which comes first in the book, may be the best thing in it. It originally appeared in the New York Times Magazine, where it was titled “Federer as Religious Experience,” and it describes the unique and astonishing prowess of the tennis player Roger Federer. I know almost nothing about tennis and never watched Federer play, but the essay was such a bravura display of Wallace’s characteristic virtues as a writer—patient and conscientious explanation of fine points, mastery of infinite shades of tone, verbal ingenuity, and the eerie sense that he is talking just to you—that my ignorance of tennis proved no obstacle to deep relishing of the essay.

Also excellent are Wallace’s review of Peter Johnson’s The Best of the Prose Poem and his introduction to the 2007 edition of The Best American Essays (which Wallace edited). Both take original and inventive approaches, but their dazzle is not strictly for dazzle’s sake, as it only makes clearer Wallace’s love of the possibilities of writing.

“Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama” is good to have, too. Like Everything and More, it highlights Wallace’s lonely eminence as a great American writer who was also a math nerd.

Some of the pieces from the 1990s have not aged as well. Wallace’s review of David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Daughter is a welcome tribute to that excellent book, but seems over-lengthy at almost fifty pages.

But it’s all good to have. After all, there will be no more.

Michael Clune, _Pan_

 PAN IS CLUNE'S sixth book and his first novel; it is also, as it happens, the first book of his I have read. I had heard his memoir White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin (2013) was good, but I tend to avoid drug memoirs. I probably would not have picked this one up had it not gotten adulatory blurbs from Ben Lerner, Maggie Nelson, Blake Butler, and Tao Lin, all writers I read with great delight. So I did pick it up, and a few pages in was thinking, "Is this as good as I think it is?" By the time I finished, I thought it was a masterpiece. 

Our narrator and main character is Nicholas, or Nick, a high schooler in Libertyville, Illinois (a relatively remote suburb of Chicago) in what seems to be the early 1990s (Nick listens to CDs, goes on the internet, and has a Guns 'n' Roses t-shirt). He lives with his divorced father, having proven too much to handle for his mother. Early in the book, he starts having panic attacks. He confides in Sarah, a girl he likes, after they bond over Boston's "More Than a Feeling," and she joins in his search for answers about his attacks. Sarah comes up with the hypothesis that Nicholas is occasionally possessed by the god Pan.

This supposition gives Nick entrée into a group of kids, some a little older, that Sarah knows. Led by college student Ian, the group meets a little outside of town in the Barn--a disused barn repurposed and re-decorated to serve as a place to take drugs and listen to music. Ian takes a particular interest in Nick's case, and the history of that interest gives us our plot.

What did I particularly like here? 

One, Clune gets the Midwest as hardly any other recent writer of comparable skill has. David Foster Wallace got the Midwest in The Pale King, I'd say, but I can't think of anyone else who quite conveys that reverberant emptiness, that featurelessness that becomes a feature.

Two, Clune conveys that sense of burgeoning selfhood when one is fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, and riding a surge of self-stuff that has no particular shape at all, but seems able, for a few hours at a time, to take any shape that anyone, friend or foe, suggests. Tell me who I am, the burgeoning selfhood asks the world. And the world has an infinity of answers, any one of which can take us over completely and then abruptly vanish.

Three, the climactic epiphany, which has to do with the flight of a fly and what we might see if we could see time as we do space, feels like a real epiphany.

In the acknowledgements at the book's close, Clune writes: "Dave, T. , S., L.: je n'ai pas oublié." (Actually, in my copy the accent aigu on "oublié" was missing, but I assume it is supposed to be there.) That Clune wants certain folks to know he has not forgotten inclines me to think that the Barn has some kind of analogue in his own background. He would have been in high school circa 1990-93. Maybe someday we will know. But Pan is a masterpiece in any case.

Joanna Klink, _Days and Chances_ (3)

 SEVERAL POEMS TOWARDS the end of the collection speak to the final illness and death of Klink's father. She had written about his illness before in The Nightfields, and very movingly, but these newer poems seem to me even more remarkable in their honesty and their willingness to think about death. 

Klink's love for her father is well to the fore, understandably, particularly in "Sand Woods," but these poems step beyond simple elegy into a kind of reckoning. She does not deal in any of the more familiar kinds of consolation or comfort, but there is in them a kind of peace or reconciliation that feels real.

I should quote something at this point, I guess. "Inner Vase" seems to be working with the idea of the body as a vessel--a classic trope if there ever was one--and the idea that, when all is said and done, what is inside the vessel is actually the same as what is outside the vessel. It ends with these lines:

          Who was I

then but the space that had

always been around me, never

not touched, the end, was it?

of my distinction, having

worked so hard to separate

myself, to distill, for decades, 

who I was, vessel, given

in in reverent surrender,

thinking always of the world

that let me stay this

long, the branch of 

air I become that is the room's

air, and the meadow's.

I'm not sure whether the poem is meant to be in her father's voice or is just imagining how the letting go of death might feel, but it sounds true to me.

Joanna Klink, _Days and Chances_ (2)

 KLINK'S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS INCLUDE thanks to Jorie Graham and Peter Sacks, which got my attention because Klink's poems often reminded me, very generally, of Graham's. I may not have noticed this had I not been reading a lot of Graham recently, because there is no very close resemblance in voice or tone, but it did occur to me that both Graham's and Klink's poems tend to be situated outdoors and to render a fine-grained, multi-sensory inventory of a chosen outdoors moment. 

Nothing all that surprising about this, I suppose, since it has been going on since Wordsworth (at least), but there is a particular heightening or intensity in the poetry of Graham and Klink. It's a little as though psychotropic pharmaceuticals were involved, although I imagine that Graham's and Klink just have more amplitude in their sensoria than I do. Nothing in the great blooming, buzzing confusion is lost on them.

Even in the sequence "Rothko Chapel," about an indoors space, Klink places us outdoors.

We are stone changed by light.
We brood against walls of
violet, see by feeling, moving
our eyes into the black silk 
surround. We hold 
still like flames. Bored through
by dusk, skeletons of dusk
watching the tides' silver shadows
blow out across  the lawn.
We pass like the day through
clouds--watching cargo
cross cold water, a blurred
phosphorescence flowing beneath
ice.

I'm not sure whether we are in an actual outdoors here or an "outdoors" conjured up by Rothko's paintings,  but whichever it is, we are immersed in it, and there is no clean separation between it and us. We and it make a whole--not exactly an "everything fits together" whole, not a "no loose ends" whole, but an inseparability, an evaporation of boundaries.

"Called" is a good example.

     [...] the rising 
scale of that bird I cannot 
see, burst of burbling
gold from the tree where
walking I heard voices not
mine, glowing dust in my
lungs, past orchards and
the stone wall. Here I
can unfold, in such
relief, diaphanous as the
spaces left by those branches
in the old orchard, burnt
sticks, emptied of who I 
was [...]

"Phenomenological" is the word that comes to mind. "Descriptive" won't do, because we get not just a picture, not just a scene, but the mutual near-dissolution of the perceiving subject in the perceived surroundings and of the perceived surroundings in the perceiving subject. One of my favorite Graham poems, "Emergency," does this, and Cole Swenson might be cited as an example too. I wish Charles Taylor's Cosmic Connections had taken up these poets.

Yongsoo Park, _Boygenius_

 I HAVE NOT been able to find out whether the title of this novel inspired the name of the group formed by Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker. No such rumors are afloat on the internet, I can attest. Even so, it seems at least possible that at least one of them might have picked up on this novel, a cult favorite in some quarters. 

Boygenius was published in 2002 by Akashic Press, and it is still in print, which is no small accomplishment. It struck me as a revision and updating of Candide. 

Narrator and main character Boy Genius was born in South Korea in the middle 1960s (I would guess) and became a national hero with his own TV show after getting the nation's highest score on an intelligence test.  His fame and privileges (which include occasional meetings with President Park Chung Hee) are abruptly yanked from him, without explanation, after an attempted assassination of President Park. 

Shunned and disgraced, he and his parents choose to emigrate, arriving in a city that is like New York City in every respect save that it is named Bogota. After a rebellious period, some of which he spends with a gang of talking dogs, he decides to go straight, finish school, and make it big. This leads to extended time in (southern) California and a total makeover in which he becomes a handsome Euro-American. He marries another Korean emigré who has similarly become a beautiful Euro-American.

Memory of the wrongs done to him and his parents will not leave him alone, though, and he embarks on a mission of vengeance, ending in...well, I'm not sure. I think he ends up in heaven, though.

Like Candide, Boy Genius in his youth is loaded up with a wobbly bundle of assumptions and expectations that go disastrously wrong for him, after which he acquires a new set of assumptions and expectations which also eventually backfire, and so on. People take advantage of his naïvete or do their best to help him out, and neither he nor the reader quite know whom to trust. As in Voltaire's tale, the structure is picaresque, a series of episodes taking Boygenius all over the world, the mode satiric, in that what Boygenius learns is that no institution or authority should be trusted. We arrive at an expectedly happy ending though, Candide in his garden, Boy Genius in paradise. If that's where he is.

(By the way, there is a very insightful 2004 blog post about the novel's relationship to Candide from a writer who goes by "Mumpsimus.")

Solvej Balle, _On the Calculation of Volume II_, trans. Barbara Haveland

 IN VOLUME ONE, Tara Selter was preoccupied with how to break the spell and get out of November 18 and into November 19. When Volume Two opens, she has been in November 18 for over a year--that is, she has had more than 365 November Eighteenths--and she seems to have decided that for the time being she will just have to reconcile herself to being in November 18 indefinitely. If she is well and truly stuck on this day, how can she make the best of it?

She makes a kind of farewell visit to her family, explaining to them daily, as she did to her husband Thomas in Volume One, why she is popping in so suddenly on November 18. Then she simply starts moving around Europe. It occurs to her that she can create a kind of "year" of her own by traveling to a place with a wintry November 18, then a while later to a place with a springlike November 18, and so on. This creates a focus for her for a while, but eventually the tactic ceases to satisfy her, and she hits a Slough of Despond.

In her lower moments, Tara reminded me of a Clarice Lispector narrator: minutely attentive, self-aware, articulate, but at a profound loss for how to account for her own circumstances.

Tara settles into Düsseldorf. November 18 was a pleasant day there, she won't be bumping into anyone she knows, she finds comfortable accommodations, and there is lots to do: attending university lectures, for example, and studying up on the history of Rome. And then, after more than another couple of years have passed, she meets someone else who is stuck in November 18. I expect an interesting development is in store in Volume Three.

It's not suspense that keeps one reading On the Calculation of Volume, though, but the voice Balle has conjured for Tara and the resourcefulness and resilience Tara has to keep finding in herself.

Alan Hollinghurst, "It's queer how I'm lonely"; Edmund Wilson, "A Revival of Ronald Firbank"; Evelyn Waugh, "Ronald Firbank"

EMILY WILSON'S SMACKDOWN of Christopher Nolan's film adaptation of the Odyssey no doubt got more attention than anything else in the August 13 issue of the London Review of Books, but the real keeper in that issue,  the real gem, the real prize, was almost 8,653 words from Alan Hollinghurst on Ronald Firbank. 

Hollinghurst is one of the great British novelists of his generation, I am convinced. His recurring theme is English queer culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. His first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, could serve as a history of that culture from Wilde to the advent of AIDS, as The Stranger's Child could for the period from World War I to Tony Blair. The Line of Beauty and The Sparsholt Affair cover shorter time frames but are likewise vivid historical portraits.

I should emphasize that I do no mean that Hollinghurst is a chronicler, or produces elephantine historical novels like those of Edward Rutherford or James Michener. He is, I suppose, a historical novelist, but one more like Anthony Powell or Proust--sharp, observant, writers of graceful and assured prose.

Novelist Ronald Firbank is a kind of icon in English queer culture because his novels (which appeared in the teens and twenties of the 20th century), while far from realistic, capture something of the queer sensibility of their time. It's hard to say what that something is. The novels are campy, but not simply that; they have a gravitas even while seeming to float free of reality. The effect is hard to describe, but Hollinghurst comes closer to explaining it than anyone else I know of has.

That "anyone else" includes such distinguished writers as Edmund Wilson and Evelyn Waugh. Wilson and Waugh, as it happens, are the ones who got me reading Firbank forty-five years ago or so. They too tried to get at what makes Firbank's novels much more than period pieces, and I appreciated Hollinghurst giving both of them a shout-out. I would say, even so, that his is now the go-to short piece on Firbank. As Wilson and Waugh got me once to read Firbank, I suspect Hollinghurst will get me to re-read him.

Joanna Klink, _Days and Chances_ (1)

 I HAVE BEEN reading Joanna Klink since her second collection, Circadian (2007).  Around 2008, she gave a reading on the campus where I taught. I remember telling her how much I appreciated Circadian and mentioning that I wanted to read her first book, They Are Sleeping. “It’s not very good,” she said. I think that’s the only time a poet ever steered me away from one of their own books. (By the way, the book was good, although perhaps not as good as Circadian.)

I read her subsequent books—Raptus (2010), Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy (2015), and The Nightfields (2020)—and they were consistently excellent (I reviewed Excerpts somewhere about ten years ago).

Even so, the people I know who would recognize the name “Joanna Klink” I could count on one hand…and I know lots of bookish people. Writing as well as she has for as long as she has should, one would think, attract measurable general attention. She has gotten some kinds of recognition: a job at a prestigious institution (Michener Center at University of Texas Austin) and a major publisher (Penguin). No Pulitzer or National Book Award, though (I hope that changes soon), and a profile a good bit lower than those of (say) Mary Oliver or Patricia Lockwood or Ocean Vuong.

I bring this up because whenever I read someone’s article on poetry’s declining prominence, on its loss of cultural centrality, or its diminishing audience, or (fill in the pessimistic blank), the assumption always floats up that poetry has been its own worst enemy, it isn’t addressing our main concerns, it’s become too hermetic…that sort of thing.

But after reading Richard Siken’s last book, then picking up this, I’m thinking…why would anyone say there’s a lack of good, strong poetry now? It’s abundant! There is so much of it! 

Why do so few people know this?

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."

Katherine Rundell, _Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne_

 I APPRECIATE DONNE, but I picked this up mainly because I enjoyed Rundell's reviews and essays in the LRB, the NYRB, etc.  She carries her learning lightly, and her prose is lucid and witty. Not unlike Donne, she snaps a neat metaphor. On the deanship of St. Paul's: "it was also a fantastic piñata of a job: hit it, and perks and favours and new connections came pouring out." On the facial hair of Edward Alleyn: "a beard that looks like he cut it with a rusty ice-skate." Topping it all, on p. 254, an abecedarian prose poem indicating the range of erudition evident in his Donne's sermons.

Donne was not only one of the great poets in a golden age of English poetry, but also "star preacher of the age," not to mention courtier, diplomat, military man, lawyer...he even did a prison stint. It's hard to imagine John Ashbery producing his body of work while also being celebrated for his sermons and accompanying American troops into Baghdad, but that's the kind of career Donne had. Those were different times, as Lou Reed once sang.

To be clear: Rundell's is neither a definitive nor a critical biography; it does not aim at comprehensive detail and touches only on some highlights of the poetry.  Worthwhile? Yes. Clocking in at just under 300 pages, authoritative and crisply written, it would make a perfect starter book for anyone curious about Donne.

Hua Hsu, _Stay True_

HUA HSU IS a staff writer at the New Yorker, and this book, his second, is a memoir focusing on a college friend, Ken Ishida, who was robbed, kidnapped, and murdered in the summer after their junior year. 

Hsu and Ken did not, judging by the surface of things, have enough in common to serve as the basis of friendship; Hsu was an indie kid, a 'zine writer who got his clothes at thrift stores, Ken a business major and frat brother who shopped at Abercrombie and Fitch. They were both "Asian-American," but the Hsus were Taiwanese-Chinese and the Ishidas Japanese, so their family cultures were distinct, too. Still, they became close friends, sharing smoke breaks on the balcony of their dormitory.

College-age folks typically embrace their chosen cultural affiliations with a certain ferocity, especially if they are indie kids, but the book goes to show one can still have a kind of flexibility and openness at that age. Or maybe the secondary-family aspect of dorm life explains the friendship, the live-and-let-live tolerance we (sometimes) extend to those with whom we share living quarters. A lot of the book is a convincing portrait of a not-that-likely friendship.

The main turn in the book, of course, is Ken's terrible death. Stay True is set mainly in the late 1990s, and I was reminded over and over of something that happened about the same time on the campus at which I was teaching: the death of one of our English majors in a house fire. Carlos's death had a galvanizing effect on his friends, I recall. The English majors at our small college tended to know each other well and socialize together, and mortality's abrupt interruption of the relatively idyllic routine of campus life was for them a psychic revolution. Real Life, when one is that age, is supposed to be some number of months or years away, yet here it was, grim and implacable and iron-visaged. Reading about what Ken's loss meant to his friends, and to Hsu in particular, was so minutely evocative of what Carlos's death meant to his friends that I am prepared to say that Hsu got this traumatic event exactly right.

Richard Siken, _Crush_

 A FRIEND'S GIVING me Siken's recent book, I Do Know Some Things, inspired me to re-read this one, his debut from 2005, a Yale Younger Poets selection. I think I read it in 2007, probably because of the selections from it in the Legitimate Dangers anthology. I remember thinking it was good, but I didn't pick up on his next collection, perhaps because it didn't arrive until 2015. 

Re-reading Crush now, I think it is not just good, but excellent, one of the outstanding debut collections of the 21st century's first decade (alongside, say, Ariana Reines's The Cow and G. C. Waldrep's Goldbeater's Skin). It seems a key precursor for collections like Ocean Vuong's Night Sky with Exit Wounds and Sam Sax's Bury It. 

In Louise Glück's introduction (she was the Yale Younger Poets judge that tapped Siken), she writes, "For a book like this to work, it cannot deviate from obsession (lest its urgency, in being occasional, seem unconvincing). Books of this kind dream big; they trust not only what drives  them but the importance of what drives them. When they work, as Plath's Ariel works, they are unforgettable; they restore to poetry that sense of crucial moment and crucial utterance which may indeed be the great genius of the form." 

That's exactly right, I think. Obsessives can be precise and passionate at one and the same time, exact and extravagant at one and the same time, because only too much comes close to being enough.

I should quote a least a bit, don't you think? Let's go with this, from "A Primer for the Small Weird Loves":

      The blond boy in the red trunks is holding your head underwater

because he is trying to kill you,

            and you deserve it, you do, and you know this,

                  and you are ready to die in this swimming pool

      because you wanted to touch his hands and lips and this means

                        your life is over anyway.

Joshua Hammer, _The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu (and Their Race to Save the World's Most Precious Manuscripts)_

 BY THE WAY, the author is the Joshua Hammer whose journalism on events in Africa appears in The Nation, the New York Review of Books, and elsewhere, not the Josh Hammer associated with the Claremont Institute and the Edmund Burke Foundation. As a case of noted authors working at the same time and sharing an unusual name, this coincidence is up there with P. Wyndham Lewis (avant-garde writer and painter) and D. B. Wyndham Lewis (popular biographer).

For quite a while, western scholars assumed that there was not much of a documentary tradition in Africa before European colonization, but they were mistaken, for Mali had extensively developed such a tradition in the 15th and 16th centuries.  Collecting, preserving, and cataloguing as many of these manuscripts as he could was the work of Abdel Kader Haidara, the bad-ass librarian whose activities we follow for much of the book.

The collection is in jeopardy after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, which enables al Qaeda-affiliated jihadists, in cooperation with Tuareg separatists, to sweep into Mali from the North. The manuscripts are the fruit of an Islamic culture, yes, but one the jihadists regard as heretical, so Haidara has to find a way to get the immense collection away safely before it is captured and destroyed.

He succeeds--as the books subtitle lets us know, so that's hardly a spoiler. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu is a brisk read, an inspiring story, and an illuminating look at both the history and the current circumstances of Mali.