The Far Field

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January Pure Wit by Francesca Peacock [NF] I first learned about the life and work of seventeenth-century writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish in Regan Penaluna's stellar study of women thinkers, and I've been dying to read a biography of Cavendish ever since. And I'm in luck (all of us are) thanks to biographer Peacock. A proto-feminist, science-fiction pioneer, and divisive public figure, Cavendish is endlessly fascinating, and Peacock's debut gives her the rigorous, in-depth treatment that she deserves. —Sophia M. Stewart Nonfiction by Julie Myerson [F] A blurb from Rachel Cusk is just about all it takes to get me excited about a book, so when I saw that Cusk called Myerson's latest novel "glitteringly painful," "steady and clear," and "the book [Myerson] was intended to write," I was sold. A tale of art, addiction, and the ties that bind mothers and daughters, Nonfiction promises to devastate. —SMS Immediacy by Anna Kornbluh [NF] Did the pandemic kill postmodernism? And what comes after the end of history? University of Illinois–Chicago professor Kornbluh dubs our contemporary style “immediacy,” characterized by same-day delivery, bingeable multimedia, and real-time news updates that spin the economic flywheel ever faster. Kornbluh names this state of emergence and emergency, and suggests potential off-ramps in the direction of calm reflection, measured art-making, and, just maybe, collective wisdom. —Nathalie op de Beeck Slow Down by Kōhei Saitō, tr. Brian Bergstrom [NF] In this internationally-bestselling treatise, Japanese philosopher Saitō argues against "sustainable growth" in favor of degrowth—the slowing of economic activity—which he sees at the only way to address the twinned crises of inequality and climate change. Saitō's proposal is simple, salient, and adapts Marx for the modern day. —SMS Relic by Ed Simon [NF] From Millions alum Simon comes a slim study of the objects we imbue with religious (or quasi-religious) meaning, from the bone of a Catholic martyr to Jimi Hendrix's guitar pick. Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series never misses, and Relic is one of the series' most unconventional—and compelling—entries yet. —SMS Filterworld by Kyle Chayka [NF] The outline of reality has become increasingly blurry as the real world melds with the digital one, becoming what Chayka, staff writer at the New Yorker, calls “Filterworld,” a society built on a foundation of ever-evolving algorithms. In his book of the same name, Chayka calls out the all-powerful algorithm, which he argues is the driving force behind current and accelerating trends in art, consumption, and ethics. —Daniella Fishman Portrait of a Body by Julie Delporte, tr. Helge Dascher and Karen Houle [NF] A gripping narrative of coming to terms with her queer identity, Canadian cartoonist Delporte's latest graphic memoir—praised by Eileen Myles and Fariha Róisín—sees Delporte learning to embrace herself in both physical and metaphysical ways. Dreamy colored pencil illustrations and gently flowing storytelling capture the beauty, trauma, and ultimate tranquility that comes with learning to exist on your own terms. —DF Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino [F] In Bertino’s latest novel, following 2020's Parakeet, the launch of Voyager 1 into space coincides with the birth of Adina Giorno, who, much like the solitary satellite, is in search of something she can't yet see. As a child, she senses that she is not of this world and struggles to make a life for herself amid the drudgery of human existence. Playing on Adina's alienness as both a metaphor and a reality, Bertino asks, “Are we really alone?” —DF The Last Fire Season by Manjula Martin [NF] Martin returns ablaze in her latest memoir, pitched as "H Is for Hawk meets Joan Didion in the Pyrocene." Following an anguishing chronic pain diagnosis, Martin attempts to reconnect with her beloved Northern California wilderness in order to escape not only her deteriorating health but a deteriorating world, which has ignited around her in the worst fire season California has ever seen. Devastating and ambivalent, The Last Fire Season tries to sift through the ashes of climate change. —DF The Furies by Elizabeth Flock [NF] Violence by women—its role, its potential righteousness—is the focus of Flock's latest. Following the real-life cases of a young rape survivor in Alabama, a predator-punishing gang leader in India, and an anti-ISIS militia fighter in Syria, Flock considers how women have used lethal force as a means to power, safety, and freedom amid misogynistic threats and oppression. Is violence ever the answer? Flock looks to three parallel lives for guidance. —SMS Imagining the Method by Justin Owen Rawlins [NF] University of Tulsa professor Rawlins demystifies that most celebrated (and controversial) acting school, challenging our contemporary conceptions of screen performance. I was sold the moment I saw Rawlins received the ultimate stamp of approval from Isaac Butler, author of the definitive account of method acting: "If you care about the evolution of twentieth-century screen performance, you should read this book." —SMS We Are Free to Change the World by Lyndsey Stonebridge [NF] Famed twentieth-century philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote passionately about power, freedom, and inequality against the backdrop of fascism—a project as relevant today as it ever was. Stonebridge, a professor of humanities and human rights, revisits the lessons of Arendt's writings and applies them to the twenty-first century, creating a dialogue between past, present, and future. —DF Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea by C.D. Rose [F] In these 19 short stories, Rose meditates on philosophy, photography, and literature. Blending erudition and entertainment, Rose's fables follow writers, teachers, and artists through various situations—and in a standout story, imagines how St. Augustine would fare on Twitter. —DF Black Women Taught Us by Jenn M. Jackson [NF] Jackson's debut book foregrounds the work of Black feminist writers and leaders—from Ida B. Wells and Harriet Jacobs to Shirley Chisholm and bell hooks—throughout American history, revealing the centuries-long role that Black women have played in imagining and fighting for a more just society. Imani Perry calls Jackson "a beautiful writer and excellent scholar." —SMS The Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzalez James [F] Pitched as Cormac McCarthy meets Gabriel García Márquez (yeesh!), The Bullet Swallower is the second novel (after Mona at Sea) from Elizabeth Gonzalez James, who also wrote the weird and wonderful essay/play Five Conversations About Peter Sellers. Infusing the spaghetti western with magical realism, the novel follows a Mexican bandito on a cosmic journey generations in the making. —SMS Last Acts by Alexander Sammartino [F] In Sammartino's debut novel, the owner of a gun store hatches a plan to resurrect his struggling business following his son's near-death experience. George Saunders, Mary Karr, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah have all heaped on praise, and Jenny Offill finds it "hard to believe Last Acts is a first novel." —SMS I Sing to Use the Waiting by Zachary Pace [NF] Pace fuses memoir and criticism (my favorite combination) to explore the emotional and cultural impacts of women singers across time, from Cat Power and Rihanna to Kim Gordon and Whitney Houston. A queer coming-of-age story that centers the power of music and the legacies of women artists. —SMS Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn [F] Blackburn, the author of the stellar story collections Black Jesus and Other Superheroes and How to Wrestle a Girl, delivers a debut novel about storytelling and unreality, centering on a successful novelist who gets hold of her dead brother's phone—and starts answering texts as him. Kristen Arnett calls this one "a bonafide knockout" that "rewired my brain." —SMS Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer [N] New Yorker staff writer Blitzer traces the harrowing history of the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, foregrounding the stories of Central American migrants whose lives have been threatened and upended by political tumult. A nuanced, layered, and rigorously reported portrait that Patrick Radden Keefe hails as "extraordinary." —SMS The Survivors of the Clotilda by Hannah Durkin [NF] Durkin, a British historian, explores the lives of 103 Africans who were kidnapped and transported on the last slave ship to dock in the U.S., shortly before the Civil War began in 1861. Many of these captives were children, and thus lived their lives against a dramatic backdrop, from the Civil War all the way up to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement. What these people experienced and how they prevailed should intrigue anybody interested in learning more about our nation’s darkest chapter. —Claire Kirch Your Utopia by Bora Chung, tr. Anton Hur [F] Following her acclaimed sophomore novel The Cursed Bunny, Chung returns with more tales from the realm of the uncanny. Covering everything from unruly AI to the quest for immortality to the environmental destruction caused by capitalism, Chung’s story collection promises more of the mystifying, horror-filled goodness that has become her calling card. —DF The Rebel's Clinic by Adam Shatz [NF] Frantz Fanon—political philosopher, psychiatrist, and author of the trailblazing Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth—is one of the most important writers and thinkers of the postcolonial era, and his work continues to inform contemporary thinking on race, capitalism, and power. In this sprawling biography, Shatz affirms Fanon's place as a towering intellect and groundbreaking activist. —SMS You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, tr. Natasha Wimmer [F] Enrigue's latest novel, following Sudden Death, reimagines the fateful 1519 invasion of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) by Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. With exuberant style, and in a lively translation by Wimmer, Enrigue brings the Aztec capital and the emperor Moctezuma to vibrant life—and rewrites their destinies. —SMS February Love Novel by Ivana Sajko, tr. by Mima Simić [F] Croatian literature may lag behind its Russian, Hungarian, Polish, and Ukrainian counterparts—roughly in that order—as far as stateside recognition goes, but we all make mistakes. Just like couples do in love and under capitalism. “A war between kitchen and bedroom,” as the liner notes read, would have been enough to sell me, but that war’s combatants, “an unemployed Dante scholar” and “a passable actress,” really sealed the deal. —John H. Maher The Unforgivable by Cristina Campo, tr. Alex Andriesse [NF] This new NYRB edition, introduced by Kathryn Davis, brings together all of the essays Campo published in her lifetime, plus a selection of additional essays and autofiction. The result is a robust introduction to a stylish—but largely forgotten—Italian writer whose "creativity was a vocation in the truest sense," per Jhumpa Lahiri. —SMS Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti [NF] Last year, I was enraptured by Heti's limited-run New York Times newsletter in which she alphabetized sentences from 10 years' worth of her diary entries—and this year, we can finally enjoy the sublime results of that experiment in book form. This is my favorite work of Heti's, full stop. —SMS Dinner on Monster Island by Tania De Rozario [NF] Blending film criticism, social commentary, and personal narrative, De Rozario (most recently the author of the Lambda Literary Award–nominated And the Walls Came Crumbling Down) explores her experience growing up queer, brown, and fat in Singapore, from suffering through a "gay-exorcism" to finding solace in horror films like Carrie. —SMS Wrong Norma by Anne Carson [NF] Everyone shut up—Anne Carson is speaking! This glistening new collection of drawings and musings from Carson is her first original work since the 2016 poetry collection Float. In Carson's own words, the collection touches on such disparate topics (she stresses they are "not linked") as Joseph Conrad, Roget's Thesaurus, snow, Guantánamo, and "my Dad." —DF Self-Portraits: Stories by Osamu Dazai, tr. Ralph McCarthy [F] Japanese writer Dazai had quite the moment in 2023, and that moment looks likely to continue into the new year. Self-Portraits is a collection of short autofiction in the signature melancholic cadence which so many Anglophone readers have come to love. Meditating on themes of hypocrisy, irony, nihilism—all with a touch of self-deprecating humor—Dazai’s work will either pull you out of a deep depression or crack your rose-colored glasses; there is no in-between. —DF Imagination by Ruha Benjamin [NF] Visionary imagination is essential for justice and a sustainable future, argues Benjamin, a Princeton professor of African American studies and founder of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. In her treatise, she reminds readers of the human capacity for creativity, and she believes failures of imagination that lead to inequity can be remedied. In place of quasi-utopian gambles that widen wealth gaps and prop up the surveillance state, Benjamin recommends dreaming collective and anti-racist social arrangements into being—a message to galvanize readers of adrienne marie brown and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. —SMS Literary Theory for Robots by Dennis Yi Tenen [NF] Artificial intelligence and machine-generated writing are nothing new, and perhaps nothing to fear, argues Tenen, a Columbia English professor and former software engineer. Traveling through time and across the world, Tenen reveals the labor and collaboration behind AI, complicating the knee-jerk (and, frankly, well-founded!) reactions many of us have to programs like ChatGPT. —SMS A Sign of Her Own by Sarah Marsh [F] Alexander Graham Bell is best known as the inventor of the telephone, but what he considered his life's work was the education of deaf children—specifically, the harmful practice of oralism, or the suppression of sign language. Marsh's wonderful debut novel unearths this little-known history and follows a deaf pupil of Bell's as she questions his teachings and reclaims her voice. —SMS Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker [NF] Journalist Bosker, who took readers behind the scenes with oenophiles in her 2017 Cork Dork, turns to avid artists, collectors, and curators for this sensory deep dive. Bosker relies on experiential reporting, and her quest to understand the human passion for visual art finds her apprenticing with creators, schmoozing with galleristas, and minding canonical pieces as a museum guard. —NodB Columbo by Amelie Hastie [NF] Columbo experienced something of a renaissance during the pandemic, with a new generation falling for the rugged, irresistible charms of Peter Falk. Hastie revisits the series, a staple of 70s-era TV, with refreshing rigor and appreciation, tackling questions of stardom, authorship, and the role of television in the process. —SMS Acts of Forgiveness by Maura Cheeks [F] Cheeks's debut novel sounds amazing and so au courant. A woman is elected U.S. president and promises Black Americans that they will receive reparations if they can prove they are descended from slaves. You’d think people would jump on achieving some social justice in the form of cold cash, right? Not Willie Revel’s family, who’d rather she not delve into the family history. This promises to be a provocative read on how the past really isn’t past, no matter how much you run from it. —CK The Sentence by Matthew Baker [F] I minored in Spanish linguistics in college and, as a result, came to love that most useless and rewarding of syntactic exercises, diagramming sentences. So I'm very excited to read Baker's The Sentence, a graphic novel set in an alternate America and comprising single, 6,732-word sentence, diagrammed in full. Syntax wonks, assemble! —SMS Neighbors by Diane Oliver [F] Before her untimely death in 1966 at the age of 22, Oliver wrote stories of race and racism in Jim Crow America characterized by what Dawnie Walton calls "audacity, wit, and wisdom beyond her years." Only four of the 14 stories in Neighbors were published in Oliver's lifetime, and Jamel Brinkley calls the publication of her posthumous debut collection "an important event in African American and American letters." —SMS The Weird Sister Collection by Marisa Crawford [NF] Essayist, poet, and All Our Pretty Songs podcaster Crawford founded the Weird Sister blog in 2014, covering books and pop culture from contemporary young feminists’ and queer perspectives. The now-defunct blog offered literary reviews, Q&As with indie authors, and think pieces on film and music. For this collection, whose foreword comes from Michelle Tea, Crawford gathers favorite pieces from contributors, plus original work with a Weird Sister edge. —NodB Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh [NF] As research for his Ibis trilogy, Ghosh mapped the opium trade around the world and across centuries. This global and personal history revisits the British Empire’s dependence on Indian opium as a trade good, and how the cultivation of and profits from opium shaped today’s global economy. In his nonfiction The Great Derangement, Ghosh employs personal anecdotes to make sense of larger-scale developments, and Smoke and Ashes promises to connect his own family and identity to today’s corporate, institutional, and environmental realities. —NodB Private Equity by Carrie Sun [NF] In her debut memoir, Sun recounts her time on Wall Street, where she worked as an assistant to a billionaire hedge-fund founder and was forced to rethink everything she thought she knew about work, money, sacrifice, and living a meaningful life. This one sounds like a great read for fans of Anna Wiener's Uncanny Valley (e.g. me). —SMS I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both by Mariah Stovall [F] When Khaki Oliver receives a letter from her estranged former best friend, she isn’t ready for the onslaught of memories that soon cause her to unravel. A Black Bildungsroman about friendship, fandom, and sanity, I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both is an unflinching look at "what it means to be young in a hard, and nonetheless beautiful, world," per Vauhini Vara. —Liv Albright Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit by Aisha Sabatini Sloan [NF] I know from personal experience that anything published by Graywolf Press is going to open my eyes and make me look at the world in a completely different way, so I have high expectations for Sloan’s essays. In this clever collection, a Black creative reflects upon race, art, and pedagogy, and how they relate to one’s life in this crazy country of ours during the time period between the 2016 election and the onset of the pandemic. —CK Language City by Ross Perlin [NF] Perlin travels throughout the most linguistically diverse city on the planet—New York—to chronicle the sounds and speakers of six endangered languages before they die out. A linguist and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, Perlin argues for the importance of little-known languages and celebrates the panoply of languages that exists in New York City. —SMS Monkey Grip by Helen Garner [F] A tale as old as time and/or patriarchal sociocultural constructs: a debut novel by a woman is published and the critics don't appreciate it—until later, at least. This proto-autofictional 1977 novel is now considered a classic of Australian "grunge lit," but at the time, it divided critics, probably because it had depictions of drug addiction and sex in it. But Lauren Groff liked it enough to write a foreword, so perhaps the second time really is the charm. —JHM Ours by Phillip B. Williams [F] A conjuror wreaks magical havoc across plantations in antebellum Arkansas and sets up a Brigadoon for the enslaved people she frees before finding that even a mystic haven isn't truly safe from the horrors of the world. What a concept! And a flexible one to boot: if this isn't adapted as a TV series, it would work just as well as an RPG. —JHM Violent Faculties by Charlotte Elsby [F] A philosophy professor influenced by the Marquis de Sade designs a series of experiments to prove its relevance as a discipline, specifically with regard to life and death, a.k.a. Philip Zimbardo (Chopped and Screwed Remix): The Novel. If you ever trusted a philosophy professor with your inner self before—and you probably shouldn't have?—you probably won't after reading this. —JHM American Abductions by Mauro Javier Cárdenas [F] Plagued by data harvesting, constant surveillance, mass deportation, and incarceration, the society at the heart of Cárdenas's new novel is less speculative dystopia than realist reflection. Channeling Philp K. Dick and Samuel Delaney, Cárdenas imagines a society where Latin Americans are systematically expunged. Following the lives of two Columbian-American sisters, one who was deported and one who stayed in the U.S., American Abduction tells a new kind of immigrant story, suffused with mysticism and philosophical rigor. —DF Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom by Grace Lavery [NF] I took Lavery's class on heterosexuality and sitcoms as an undergrad, and I'm thrilled to see the course's teachings collected in book form. Lavery argues that since its inception the sitcom has depicted heterosexuality as constantly on the verge of collapse, only to be reconstituted at the end of each half-hour episode. A fascinating argument about the cultural project of straightness. —SMS Whiskey Tender by Deborah Taffa [NF] Almost a decade in the making, this memoir from Taffa details generations of Southwest Native history and the legacies of assimilationist efforts. Taffa—a citizen of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe, and director of the MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts—was born on the California Yuma reservation and grew up in Navajo territory in New Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s. She reflects on tribal identity and attitudes toward off-reservation education she learned from her parents’ and grandparents’ fraught formative experiences. —NodB Normal Women by Philippa Gregory [NF] This is exciting news for Anglophiles and history nerds like me: Philippa Gregory is moving from historical fiction (my guilty pleasure) about royal women and aristocrats in medieval and early modern England to focus on the lives of common women during that same time period, as gleaned from the scraps of information on them she has unearthed in various archives. I love history “from the bottom up” that puts women at the center, and Gregory is a compelling storyteller, so my expectations are high. —CK Blue Lard by Vladimir Sorokin, tr. Max Lawton [F] Upon its publication in 1999, Sorokin's sci-fi satire Blue Lard sparked protests across Russia. One aspect of it particularly rankled: the torrid, sexual affair it depicts between Stalin and Khruschev. All to say, the novel is bizarre, biting, and utterly irreverent. Translated into English for the first time by Lawton, Sorokin's masterwork is a must-read for anyone with an iconoclastic streak. —SMS Piglet by Lottie Hazell [F] Hazell's debut novel follows the eponymous Piglet, a successful cookbook editor identified only by her unfortunate childhood nickname, as she rethinks questions of ambition and appetite following her fiancé's betrayal. Per Marlowe Granados, Hazell writes the kind of "prose Nora Ephron would be proud of." —SMS Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley [NF] Crosley enlivens the grief memoir genre with the signature sense of humor that helped put her on the literary map. In Grief Is for People, she eulogizes the quirks and complexities of her friendship with Russell Perreault, former publicity director at Vintage Books, who died by suicide in 2019. Dani Shapiro hails Crosley’s memoir—her first full-length book of nonfiction—as “both a provocation and a balm to the soul.” —LA The Freaks Came Out to Write by Tricia Romano [NF] The freaks came out to write, and you better believe the freaks will come out in droves to read! In this history of the legendary alt-weekly the Village Voice, Romano (a former writer for the Voice) interviews some 200 members the paper’s most esteemed staff and subjects. A sweeping chronicle of the most exciting era in New York City journalism promises to galvanize burgeoning writers in the deflating age of digital media. —DF Burn Book by Kara Swisher [NF] Swisher has been reporting on the tech industry for 30 years, tracing its explosive growth from the dawn of the internet to the advent of AI. She's interviewed every tech titan alive and has chronicled their foibles and failures in excruciating detail. Her new book combines memoir and reportage to tell a comprehensive history of a troubled industry and its shortsighted leaders. —SMS Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange [F] Orange returns with a poignant multi-generational tale that follows the Bear Shield-Red Feather family as they struggle to combat racist violence. Picking up where Orange's hit debut novel, There There, left off, Wandering Stars explores memory, inheritance, and identity through the lens of Native American life and history. Per Louise Erdrich, “No one knows how to express tenderness and yearning like Tommy Orange." —LA March The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan [F] Callahan's debut novel follows a young artist as she faces sudden hearing loss, forcing to reevaluate her orientation to her senses, her art, and the world around her. Amina Cain, Moyra Davey, and Kate Zambreno are all fans (also a dream blunt rotation), with the latter recommending this one be "read alongside the novels of W.G. Sebald, Rachel Cusk, and Maria Gainza." —SMS The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft [F] When a group of translators arrive at the home of renowned novelist Irena Rey, they expect to get to work translating her latest book—instead, they get caught up in an all-consuming mystery. Irena vanishes shortly after the translators arrive, and as they search for clues to the author's disappearance, the group is swept up by isolation-fueled psychosis and obsession. A “mischievous and intellectually provocative” debut novel, per Megha Majumdar. —LA Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk, tr. Heather Cleary [F] This isn’t your typical meet-cute. When two women—one grieving, the other a vampire, both of them alienated and yearning for more—cross paths in a Buenos Aires cemetery, romance blooms. Channelling Carmen Maria Machado and Anne Rice, Yuszczuk reimagines the vampire novel, with a distinctly Latin American feminist Gothic twist. —LA The Great Divide by Cristina Henríquez [F] I'm a sucker for meticulously researched and well-written historical fiction, and this one—a sweeping story about the interconnected lives of the unsung people who lived and labored at the site of the Panama Canal—fits the bill. I heard Henríquez speak about this novel and her writing processes at a booksellers conference, and, like the 300 booksellers present, was impressed by her presentation and fascinated at the idea of such a sweeping tale set against a backdrop so larger-than-life and dramatic as the construction of the Panama Canal. —CK Bite Your Friends by Fernanda Eberstadt [NF] Melding memoir and history, Eberstadt's Bite Your Friends looks at the lives of saints, philosophers, and artists—including the author and her mother—whose abberant bodies became sites of subversion and rebellion. From Diogenes to Pussy Riot, Eberstadt asks what it means to put our bodies on the line, and how our bodies can liberate us. —SMS Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez [F] When Raquel Toro, an art history student, stumbles on the story of Anita de Monte, a once prominent artist from the '80s whose mysterious death cut short her meteoric rise, her world is turned upside down. Gonzalez's sophomore novel (after her hit debut Olga Dies Dreaming) toggles between the perspectives of Raquel and Anita (who is based on the late Ana Mendieta) to explore questions of power, justice, race, beauty, and art. Robert Jones, Jr. calls this one "rollicking, melodic, tender, and true—and oh so very wise." —LA My Heavenly Favorite by Lucas Rijneveld, tr. Michele Hutchison [F] Rijneveld, author of the International Booker Prize-winning novel The Discomfort of Evening, returns with a new take on the Lolita story, transpiring between a veterinarian and a farmer's daughter on the verge of adolescence. "This book unsettled me even as it made me laugh and gasp," gushes Brandon Taylor. "I'm in awe." Radiant by Brad Gooch [NF] Lauded biographer Gooch propels us through Keith Haring’s early days as an anonymous sidewalk chalk artist to his ascent as a vigilante muralist, pop-art savant, AIDS activist, and pop-culture icon. Fans of Haring's will not want to miss this definitive account of the artist's life, which Pulitzer-winner biographer Stacy Schiff calls "a keen-eyed, beautifully written biography, atmospheric, exuberant, and as radiant as they come." —DF The Riddles of the Sphinx by Anna Shechtman [NF] Sometimes you encounter a book that seems to have been written specifically for you; this was the feeling I had when I first saw the deal announcement for Shechtman's debut book back in January 2022. A feminist history of the crossword puzzle? Are you kidding me? I'm as passionate a cruciverbalist as I am a feminist, so you can imagine how ravenously I read this book. The Riddles of the Sphinx is one of the best books of 2024, hands down, and I can't wait for everyone else—puzzlers and laymen alike—to fall in love with it too. —SMS The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov, tr. Boris Drayluk [F] Kurkov is one of Ukraine's most celebrated novelists, and his latest book is a murder mystery set against the backdrop of WWI-era Kyiv. I'll admit what particularly excites me about The Silver Bone, though, is that it is translated by Dralyuk, who's one of the best literary translators working today (not to mention a superb writer, editor, and poet). In Drayluk's hands, Kurkov's signature humor and sparkling style come alive. —SMS Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls [NF] This multigenerational graphic memoir follows Hull, alongside her mother and grandmother, both of whom hail from China, across time and space as the delicate line between nature and nurture is strained by the forces of trauma, duty, and mental illness. Manjula Martin calls Feeding Ghosts “one of the best stories I’ve read about the tension between family, history, and self.” —DF It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken [F] Haunting prose and a pithy crow guide readers through Marcken's novel of life after death. In a realm between reality and eternity, the undead traverse westward through their end-of-life highlight reel, dissecting memories, feelings, and devotions while slowly coming to terms with what it means to have lived once all that remains is love. Alexandra Kleeman admits that she "was absolute putty in this book's hands." —DF Parasol Against the Axe by Helen Oyeyemi [F] When I visited Prague, a year after the 1989 Velvet Revolution, the Czech capital struck me as a magical place, where anything is possible, and Oyeyemi captures the essence of Prague in Parasol Against the Axe, the story of a woman who attends her estranged friend's bachelorette weekend in the city. A tale in which reality constantly shifts for the characters and there is a thin line between the factual and the imagined in their relationships, this is definitely my kind of a read. —CK Say Hello to My Little Friend by Jennine Capó Crucet [F] Crucet's latest novel centers on a failed Pitbull impersonator who embarks on a quest to turn himself into a modern-day Tony Montana—a quest that leads him to cross paths with Lolita, a captive orca at the Miami Seaquariam. Winking at both Scarface and Moby-Dick, Say Hello to My Little Friend is "a masterclass in pace and precision," per Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. —SMS But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu [F] Girl, a Malaysian-Australian who leaves home for the U.K. to study Sylvia Plath and write a postcolonial novel, finds herself unable to shake home—or to figure out what a "postcolonial novel" even is. Blurbs are untrustworthy, but anything blurbed by Brandon Taylor is almost certainly worth checking out. —JHM Wrong Is Not My Name by Erica N. Cardwell [NF] Cardwell blends memoir, criticism, and theory to place her own Künstlerroman in conversation with the work of Black visual artists like Lorna Simpson, Lorraine O'Grady, and Kara Walker. In interconnected essays, Cardwell celebrates the brilliant Black women who use art and storytelling to claim their place in the world. —SMS Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham [F] A theater critic at the New Yorker, Cunningham is one of my favorite writers working today, so I was thrilled to learn of his debut novel, which cheekily steals its title from the Dickens classic. Following a young Black man as he works on a historic presidential campaign, Great Expectations tackles questions of politics, race, religion, and family with Cunningham's characteristic poise and insight. —SMS The Future of Songwriting by Kristin Hersh [NF] In this slim volume, Throwing Muses frontwoman and singer-songwriter Hersh considers the future of her craft. Talking to friends and colleagues, visiting museums and acupuncturists, Hersh threads together eclectic perspectives on how songs get made and how the music industry can (and should) change. —SMS You Get What You Pay For by Morgan Parker [NF] Parker, a brilliant poet and author of the stellar There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce, debuts as an essayist with this candid, keen-eyed collection about life as a Black woman in America. Casting her gaze both inward and onto popular culture, Parker sees everything and holds back nothing. —SMS Mother Doll by Katya Apekina [F] Following up her debut novel, The Deeper the Water, the Uglier the Fish, Apekina's Mother Doll follows Zhenia, an expectant mother adrift in Los Angeles whose world is rocked by a strange call from a psychic medium with a message from Zhenia's Russian Revolutionary great-grandmother. Elif Batuman calls this one "a rare achivement." —SMS Solidarity by Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix [NF] What does "solidarity" mean in a stratified society and fractured world? Organizers and activists Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor look at the history of the concept—from its origins in Ancient Rome to its invocation during the Black Live Matter movement—to envision a future in which calls for solidarity can produce tangible political change. —SMS The Manicurist's Daughter by Susan Lieu [NF] After her mother, a refugee of the Vietnam war and the owner of two nail salons, dies from a botched cosmetic surgery, Lieu goes looking for answers about her mother's mysterious life and untimely death. Springing from her hit one-woman show 140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother, Lieu's debut memoir explores immigration, beauty, and the American Dream. —SMS Through the Night Like a Snake ed. Sarah Coolidge [F] There's no horror quite like Latin American horror, as any revering reader of Cristina Rivera Garza—is there any other kind?—could tell you. Two Lines Press consistently puts out some of the best literature in translation that one can come by in the U.S., and this story collection looks like another banger. —JHM Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel [F] Bullwinkel's debut collection, Belly Up, was a canful of the uncanny. Her debut novel, on the other hand, sounds gritty and grounded, following the stories of eight teenage girls boxing in a tournament in Reno. Boxing stories often manage to punch above their weight (sorry) in pretty much any medium, even if you're not versed enough in the sport to know how hackneyed and clichéd that previous clause's idiomatic usage was. —JHM Choose This Now by Nicole Haroutunian [F] Haroutunian's novel-in-stories, part of Noemi Press's Prose Series, follows a pair of inseparable friends over the years as they embark on careers, make art, fall in and out of love, and become mothers. Lydia Kiesling calls this one "a sparkling, intimate look at women's lives" that makes "for a lovely reading experience." —SMS Death by Laughter by Maggie Hennefeld [NF] Hennefeld's scholarly study explores the forgotten history and politics of women's "hysterical laughter," drawing on silent films, affect theory, feminist film theory, and more. Hennefeld, a professor of cultural studies and comparative literature, offers a unique take on women's pleasure and repression—and how the advent of cinema allowed women to laugh as never before. —SMS James by Percival Everett [F] In James, the once-secondary character of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn narrates his version of life on the Mississippi. Jim, who escapes enslavement only to end up in adventures with white runaway Huck, gives his account of well-known events from Mark Twain’s 1880s novel (and departs from the record to say what happened next). Everett makes readers hyperaware of code-switching—his 2001 novel Erasure was about a Black novelist whose career skyrockets when he doubles down on cynical stereotypes of Blackness—and Jim, in James, will have readers talking about written vernacular, self-awareness, and autonomy. —NodB A Chance Meeting by Rachel Cohen [NF] Chronicling 36 fateful encounters among 30 writers and artists—from Henry James to Gertrude Stein, Mark Twain to Zora Neal Hurston—Cohen paints a vast and sparkling portrait of a century's worth of American culture. First published in 2004, and reissued by NYRB, A Chance Meeting captures the spark of artistic serendipity, and the revived edition features a new afterword by the author. —SMS Who's Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler [NF] Butler has had an outsized impact on how we think and talk about gender and sexuality ever since the 1990 publication of Gender Trouble, which theorized the way gender is performed and constructed. Butler's latest is a polemic that takes on the advent of "anti-gender ideology movements," arguing that "gender" has become a bogeyman for authoritarian regimes. —SMS Green Frog by Gina Chung [F] Chung, author of the acclaimed debut novel Sea Change, returns with a story collection about daughters and ghosts, divorcees and demons, praying mantises and the titular verdant amphibians. Morgan Talty calls these 15 stories "remarkable." —SMS No Judgment by Lauren Oyler [NF] Oyler is one of our sharpest and most fearless cultural critics, and No Judgement is her first essay collection, following up her debut novel Fake Accounts. Opining on gossip and anxiety, autofiction and vulnerability, and much, much more, Oyler's caustic wit and penetrating voice shine through every essay. —SMS Memory Piece by Lisa Ko [F] Following up her National Book Award–nominated debut novel The Leavers, Ko's latest follows three lifelong friends from the 1990s to the 2040s. A meditation on the meaning of a "meaningful life" and how to adapt to an increasingly inhospitable world, Memory Piece has earned praise from Jacqueline Woodson and C Pam Zhang, who calls the novel "bright with defiance, intelligence, and stubborn love." —SMS On Giving Up by Adam Phillips [NF] Psychoanalyst Phillips—whose previous subjects include getting better, wanting to change, and missing out—takes a swing at what feels like a particularly timely impulse: giving up. Questioning our notions of sacrifice and agency, Phillips asks when giving up might be beneficial to us, and which parts of our lives might actually be worth giving up. —SMS There's Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib [NF] Abdurraqib returns (how lucky are we!) with a reflection on his lifelong love of basketball and how it's shaped him. While reconsidering his childhood, his relationship with his father, and the meaning of "making it," Abdurraqib delivers what Shea Serrano calls "the sharpest, most insightful, most poignant writing of his career." —SMS The Angel of Indian Lake by Stephen Graham Jones [F] The final installment of Jones's trilogy picks up four years after Don't Fear the Reaper. Jade Daniels is back from prison, and upon her release, she encounters serial killer-worshipping cults, the devastating effects of gentrification, and—worst of all—the curse of the Lake Witch. Horror maestro Brian Keene calls Jones's grand finale "an easy contender for Best of the Year." —LA Worry by Alexandra Tanner [F] This deadpan debut novel from Tanner follows two sisters on the cusp of adulthood as they struggle to figure out what the hell to do with their lives. Heads butt, tempers flare, and existential dread creeps in as their paths diverge amid the backdrop of Brooklyn in 2019. Limning the absurdity of our internet-addled, dread-filled moment, Tanner establishes herself as a formidable novelist, with Kiley Reid calling Worry "the best thing I've read in a very long time." —DF [millions_email]

We Dance On: On Reading Roethke

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1. It’s hot outside. Now that the heavy machinery of late-spring squall lines and swirling, tornadic motion produced by cold fronts sliding down from the Rockies to the northwest of us and roaring over the sky above the plains of Oklahoma has given way to the massive bulk of Hurricane Bill coming up out of the gulf, lumbering his way up over Texas -- and though the Cimarron River near where I live is, here in late June, still fat from the record-setting rainfall of this past May -- the air is humming with the lethargy of the moment before creation, waiting. The air is saying: comes this way a big storm. The air is saying: comes this way the remnants of a hurricane from the sea to the south. As the first explorative raindrops fall scattershot on my back porch, as the hurricane begins crashing against the coast of Texas, its strength building, the barometric pressure here in central Oklahoma climbing so high I can barely think, barely breathe -- Theodore Roethke and all he’s meant to me comes back to mind. The sky has been boiling for days without event. We’ve had no tornadoes for more than three weeks, which, in central Oklahoma in early summer, is a long time. As the first fat raindrops fall from the newly tropical sky, I read Roethke: Snail, snail, glister me forward, / Bird, soft-sigh me home, / Worm, be with me. / This is my hard time. 2. At the time of Roethke’s death in 1963 from a heart attack in a swimming pool on Bainbridge Island, which lies directly across Puget Sound from Seattle, he was regarded as one the preeminent living American poets, rivaled only in his generation by Robert Lowell. If you take a look at his place on the shelf of any large university library, you’ll find a hefty swath of scholarship on him dating from the late-'50s well into the early-'70s. In the early-'80s, though, scholarly work on Roethke dried up. Though his poetry was much lauded during the final decade of his life -- he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1954 for The Waking, and received both the Bollingen and the National Book Award for 1959’s Words for the Wind -- he regarded himself principally as a failure. In comparison to other of his contemporaries whose places in literary history have for the most part solidified, Elizabeth Bishop being but one example, his star has fallen. This despite winning another National Book Award posthumously for The Far Field, released two years after his death, despite nearly winning another for his Collected Poems the next year, and though his work was a tremendous influence on both Sylvia Plath and, as poet August Kleinzahler pointed out recently in the London Review of Books, John Berryman. In an interview with The Paris Review in 1976, at what was probably the peak of Roethke’s posthumous fame, the poet James Dickey referred to him as “the greatest American poet,” even going so far as to say Walt Whitman was “no competition” for him. Yet in the years since, Roethke’s work has rusted into oblivion, largely unread and unremarked-upon. The reasons for this are twofold. The first and easiest to elucidate is the criticism he suffered most from in his own lifetime: that his lesser work was too derivative of other poets, namely W.B. Yeats. It’s a criticism that he to some degree openly courted. For Roethke, influence was something to be transcended by reveling in it. The poem of another could not be known, could not be truly inhabited, unless he had written it in his own hand. And, in the notebooks in the archives at the University of Washington where his papers are stored, one can find poem after poem by a multitude of writers that he felt compelled to write out, longhand. Like the novelist Jonathan Lethem, Roethke regarded influence not as an anxiety but an ecstasy. It is true that, in his lesser works, his poetry suffers from being too dependent on that of his predecessors, but what poet’s work, even a great poet’s, fails to show some influence of other poets at some time or another? On the other hand, in Roethke’s best work, using what is arguably the most rhythmic, musical poetic line of his generation, he reaches for a oneness with nature and an apocalypse of spirit that few American poets of any era have reached. Which leads me to the next, more ethereal reason for Roethke’s decline in prominence. It’s one that I can’t emphasize enough: there has, for some time, been no place in the American literary mainstream for the religious, God-addled, apocalyptic consciousness of someone like Roethke. It’s as if the entire critical apparatus used to deal with a writer whose work grapples explicitly, aggressively with the Eternal has disappeared. Aside from Annie Dillard, whose work (both creative and critical) certainly soars with a transcendentalist, eternity-haunted uplift, there have been few recent writers willing to wade out into the mouth of the river and seek the God-who-dwells-in-the-depths. What’s a contemporary critic to do with a writer who pleads, Hopkins-like, near the end of his final book of poems: Lord, hear me out, and hear me out this day: / From me to Thee’s a long and terrible way? 3. The chronology of what follows is confusing but unimportant. Follow if you can: So far, at age 21, I had had only one relationship that could really be called mutual, and which was abruptly ended when the sarcastic, funny girl from Texas I was dating suddenly saw me as the gaping pit of need that I was, and was willing to tell me so. I was a sinkhole. Immediately before her, and immediately after her, followed two relationships with women who seemed as damaged as I thought I was, and their rejections -- in both cases exceedingly gentle, and all the more confusing as a result -- left me, one cool, still night that year thinking seriously that my best plan of action might be to smuggle a cement block onto the Bainbridge Ferry under the cover of darkness and, my arms wrapped around it, leap off into the depths of Puget Sound. Fortunately, a friend found me that night -- no fatal ferry ride would be forthcoming. I was a sad sack with an iron conviction that I was totally fucked. And then Roethke came into my hands the next December. A library copy of the The Far Field lay open in my lap as I took a bus to Sea-Tac at sunrise. I was about to fly home for winter break. In the blue light of dawn, as the bus shook beneath me, for the first time I read: "Dreams drain the spirit if we dream too long," and felt a shiver go through my whole being: In a bleak time, when a week of rain is a year, The slag-heaps fume at the edge of the raw cities: The gulls wheel over their singular garbage; The great trees no longer shimmer; Not even the soot dances. And the spirit fails to move forward, But shrinks into a half-life, less than itself and it was a revelation for me. For the first time in the entire two years I’d been living in Seattle, I felt like I could breathe. Suddenly each breath brought its proper draught of air into my lungs -- and this, from a pair of stanzas about the spirit’s failure to move! I was raw, and could see those raw cities, could feel those gulls wheeling, screeching over the singular wreckage of my young and aching heart. A tornado had reached down into the grinding tropical depression my life had become: I knew I’d found someone who could help me through my hard time. I was exhilarated. 4. Here’s how I saw it: He was born in Saginaw, Mich,, nowhere-place. I was born in Talihina, Okla., an even more nowhere-place. His father was proud, demanding, and Germanically rigid in his habits and beliefs; so was mine. My father was far removed, 2,000 miles away in Oklahoma, fierce in his religious beliefs, and displeased with the thoughtless -- or so he thought -- pattern of my life. On a misbegotten visit in the spring of my first year in Seattle, sitting in the sun outside a steel-and-grease hamburger joint near the Fremont Bridge that I’d thought might cheer us both up, through a voice choked by anger and sadness, my father let me know just how disappointed he was at what he viewed as my losing my faith -- his faith. For weeks afterward, I walked the streets of Seattle in a haze, lost in the fog of my father’s wrath, and God’s distance, the both of which felt inextricably linked. Roethke had moved to Seattle from his part of the middle of the country, in Michigan. I had moved there from mine, in Oklahoma. Roethke’s father died when he was 15; he spent the last part of his life elegizing his longing for both his long-dead earthly father and for oneness with his supernatural one. With my own father far removed and a perpetual image of his saddened, outraged, grimacing mouth in my mind, I sought surrogate fathers elsewhere, everywhere I could. My undergraduate advisor became a father to me; my therapist, a mountainous man named Bil, became another. These men were not always willing to play the role I’d given them, and who could blame them? They hadn’t signed up to play daddy for a gaping young man barely in his 20s, too often drunk and drowning under the weight of his own sadness, not for this youth made of need, so hungry for guidance, for a warm hand to settle on his shoulder and tell him he was acceptable. Remembering the version of myself who sat in those chairs in those offices across from those men, under the fading gray light of so many Seattle afternoons, it’s almost too embarrassing to contemplate. Love me! I was saying. Tell me I am a man. 5. The sky here in Oklahoma, on this cloud-washed afternoon, could be a Seattle sky, if it weren’t for the stifling humidity beneath it, here on the ground. Up above, gray fades into gray, white to off-white, cirrus strands interrupted by cumulus clouds stretched out like clumps of torn, dirty cotton. The slow, convoluted motions of the front coming up from the gulf. These clouds bring no wind, none of the thunderous clatter of the fronts that rip down over the plains to the north -- this storm is a sleepy monster, fascinated with its own languor. Here’s the real difference between tornadoes and hurricanes: the latter are infatuated with themselves, and take their sweet, destructive time, while the former reach down from the firmament with all the suddenness, anger, and fury of the Old Testament Yahweh, and may, if they feel like it -- though they tear down all four walls of a house and rip apart every cowering, pleading-to-God inhabitant within -- leave a glass of milk untouched, unshuddering, on a table with three legs. [millions_email] 6. There are two kinds of reading. The first involves sucking up a writer’s body of work vacuum-style, like a construction worker eats his lunch, quickly and efficiently. This style of reading is not without its merits, being that there is more out there to read than one could ever hope to finish, and to have a solid breadth of reading is essential for any writer. Yet the dark side of this kind of reading is that while one may scoop up the general concepts, subject matter, and style of any particular author, as one blazes through their collected poems, one runs the risk of missing the real depth of the author in question (if there is any). The second kind of reading is exactly the opposite of the first. It’s the kind of reading proceeds solely -- and, typically, slowly -- for nourishment’s sake, and it’s the kind of reading I gave to Roethke’s final book of poems, The Far Field. For months I went nowhere without my library copy of it. When I finally, reluctantly, had to turn the copy back in I bought my own. I read and reread the massive, expansive poems of the “North American Sequence,” and the apocalyptic, God-beyond-God obsessed “Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical,” sometimes lingering with those poems the way one lingers in bed on a Saturday morning, sometimes shaking in the dark, repeating: The right thing happens to the happy man. I hoped Roethke was right. But how to be happy? I wondered. Did the wrong thing, then, happen to the unhappy man? I was anything but happy. I felt crushed, spiritually homeless, geographically fenced off: a strand of barbed wire stretched between myself and the home I longed for. 7. My first effort at writing about Roethke was an abortive one. My undergraduate advisor, a literature professor who’d first taught Roethke’s work as a graduate student at the University of Washington in the mid-'70s, back when Roethke’s poetry was still required reading, wanted me to deeply engage with the poems themselves, word-by-word, image-by-image, line-by-line. What I wanted to write about was the part of my self that reading Roethke had brought screaming onto the center stage of my inner life. And that, I thought somewhat petulantly, wasn’t to be found in between images, or by marking the stresses in the long, rhythmic free verse lines of Roethke’s “North American Sequence.” It’s not that I didn’t care about the language -- in some ways I cared about little else, or at least thought I did. But couldn’t the poetry speak for itself? What was the point of analysis, I wondered, when I was dreaming of cement blocks on ferry rides, lonely as a lone cottonwood on a rise in a wheat field, trembling before the flashing teeth of an F5 twister reaching down out of a viper-green sky? I thought any analysis of Roethke’s poetry, the sounds of which I could hear more clearly than anything else in the storm that was my life at the time, would be murder to dissect. 8. Roethke, fortunately, was not so put off by my eagerness, or by my need, or by misplaced desire for a new father. If anything, he and I were on the same wavelength -- although his was the more expansive. Reading him, I found the world vaster than I had previously thought possible. Sitting at the mouth of the Oyster River, which is located on Vancouver Island, in the coming of the first dark of evening, he returns in memory to his first home, in Michigan: "In this hour, / In the first heaven of knowing, / The flesh takes on the pure poise of the spirit," he writes, I shift on my rock, and I think: Of the first trembling of a Michigan brook in April, Over the lip of stone, the tiny rivulet; And that wrist-thick cascade tumbling from a cleft rock and thus, he embodies one river, a river near his home, while sitting beside another, in the Pacific Northwest, which was something I badly needed to do as I sat reading in the sand of a Puget Sound beach, wanting to go home again, to the river where I grew up in southeastern Oklahoma, but being unable to. Reading Roethke was a way for me to go home again. 9. Earlier I said it’s me taken me six years to write this essay. A long time for a mere 4,000 words to present themselves. I’ve given up time and time again, and it’s beyond me why or how I woke up a few days ago with my long-planned, longer-abandoned “Roethke essay” on my brain. For years I’ve wanted to write about Roethke; for years I’ve felt like I wasn’t ready yet. So why didn’t I just do it? There’s a curious thing that happens when you truly subsume a writer’s work, when his or her work becomes a necessary sacrament, a part of the spiritual fabric of your life. It’s strange. Of course, no one can write well about an author she hasn’t deeply read. On the other hand, the more time I spent with his work the less I could actually say. This is the central crux of trying to write creatively about any author who means much to you, whose work has become an integral piece of the architecture of your inner world, because the work of a writer truly absorbed becomes slippery in the mind, like God. The more time you spend with the writer, the more mysterious he or she becomes to you. You approach the work; at the same moment the work both approaches you and recedes into the distance. The more time I spent with Roethke’s poems the less I could say about them. As the work became less and less external to me, and more and more part of my inner self, there was no way I could bring to bear on it the detached eye my professor seemed to want. When something becomes one with the inner self it loses its ability to be explained -- and this makes sense, because the self is the great occluding mystery of human existence. It’s a fundamentally religious attitude: the more we know, the better we know how little we can say. All writing is ultimately writing about the self, and that’s the tough part: Roethke eludes me inasmuch as I elude myself. Long ago, he became another ineffable symbol in the inner chamber of my heart where the things I least comprehend -- yet most want to -- are kept, as inexpressible as my continued belief in God, as mysterious as my inability to let my obscure faith go. He, too, had trouble with God, was frightened by God and about God: "I’m aware that...to approach God without benefit of clergy is grievous lapse in taste, if not a mortal sin. But in crawling out of a swamp, or up what small rock-faces I try to essay, I don’t need a system on my back," he wrote. He valued disorder, because disorder was the world in which he lived. Disorder, rather than order, was where he found beauty and was where beauty found him. It affected the form his poems took: "some of us out in the provinces operated under difficulties: we’ve had our disorganized lives and consequently our intractable material: we’ve had to use free verse, on occasion." Yet what he wanted, really, was joy. He didn’t seek suffering, as many of the poets of his generation seemed to. Suffering was simply what he found, what he experienced in the world. Yet: "I think we could do with more style," he wrote, thinking about the writing of poetry, "more assonance, more élan, more verve, more animal spirits, more fun. These are not solemn matters." He understood that the most serious of matters -- and for Roethke, poetry was the most serious, most all consuming of matters -- are where comedy, where joy most richly resides. He was no Rainer Maria Rilke, no Robert Lowell, or, to use a more recent example, no Jonathan Franzen, drenched in self-seriousness. He was a great teacher of poetry, but he did not view himself as a distiller of poetic wisdom: "All the time you’re in here [in my class] something is supposed to be going on: you’re not just sitting there," he wrote, "you’re not receptacles, little vessels into which I pour something: our insights are mutual." He loved beginners, knowing they see things the more experienced -- and therefore cynical, or self-satisfied -- don’t, and that what the young see they often see more fiercely. Elsewhere, in what can only be presumed were notes for a first-day-of-class lecture, he wrote: "To find out something about your life: that will be the purpose...Faith. That’s it. This course is an act of faith. In what? In the imagination of us all, in a creative capacity -- that most sacred thing -- that lies dormant, never dead, in everyone."Yet this was no self-esteem inducing nicety: "My amiability lasts only through the opening day," he wrote. "From now on, it’s blood, sweat, and jeers." [1] 10. Bill’s fury has gone: the clouds have lifted, and yesterday, the summer solstice left the sun hanging in the western sky until long after nine o’clock. Summer’s here, the season of hot wind blowing dirty trash through the streets of downtown Stillwater, a wild yet elegant dance that perhaps Roethke, with his slag-heaps fuming “at the edge of raw cities” could appreciate, trash waltzing with trash, abandoned water bottles with grease-stained, dried out McDonald's hamburger sacks in the wind, dusty cigarette butts glancing off beer cans scudding down the sidewalk, under a 96-degree sun. For the first time in a week, I feel truly at peace. The twisted caps of empty ink pens are chasing chewed up drinking straws in roughly concentric circles along the alleyway: all is right with the world. 11. Ultimately, I realized I could find no father except my own. Something changed: the long depression gradually lifted. Part of this was because I fell in love with a woman who loved me despite my laughable melodrama, despite my real sense of worthlessness. Part of it was because I realized that I didn’t have to understand it all, or unpack it -- and that was the most important part. I reconciled with my father, who found he could embrace who I was despite our fundamental disconnect on who God was; I was able to embrace who he was because, with the help of my therapist, I realized that my father was not God. Just because Roethke seemed to conflate the two in his poetry didn’t mean I had to in my life. I let my dad come down off the pedestal, and he was more than willing to return to the earth. We both felt pretty relieved by this. Suddenly I was stronger than I thought. I could leave suffering behind, no longer in need of heavy weather, and step out into the sun. 12. All this has been a remembering, a remembering that’s been six years coming. I read Roethke during a rough time, in a dark time, during a disorder I couldn’t quite comprehend. I read Roethke when I doubted whether going on living was worthwhile. I read him when it seemed like my life could blink out, to no purpose. I read Roethke on the edge, and though he didn’t exactly help bring me back off it, he did comfort me there, in part by his example -- despite the darkness of his life, his manic depression, and his alcoholism, he ultimately embraced a light he could not himself see. The last words of the last poem of his last book of published poetry: "We dance on." [1] All of the quotes in the above section I’ve gleaned from Straw for the Fire, a collection of excerpts from Roethke’s notebooks, which was edited by the poet David Wagoner, Roethke’s student and, later, colleague. Image Credit: Unsplash/Nikolas Noonan.