Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016

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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]

Guilt Is Fecund: The Millions Interviews Frank Bidart

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At 82, Frank Bidart remains one of the preeminent voices in American letters, let alone American poetry. He has won nearly every major prize awarded to poets, among them the Griffin Poetry Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Wallace Stevens Award. For more than half a century, his poems have investigated the dualities of body and soul and love and hate through the exploration of both self and others. His work, as poet Craig Morgan Teicher put it for NPR, with its "relentlessly intense voice," has over the years been distilled "down to an essential expression of need and desire, of how art, if it can't save us, can at least embody and preserve us." On Nov. 3, after months of delays due to issues with the supply chain, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Bidart's eighth collection, Against Silence. Our conversation, however, was held four months earlier, over a phone call that spanned the better part of an hour and a half. Bidart—generously, modestly, and, most of all, passionately—spoke with me about the sociocultural circumstances that inspired his latest collection, the difference between poetry of identity and poetry of the personal, his relationship with that titan of 20th-century American poetics, Robert Lowell, and the power guilt and memory hold over his art. This interview has been edited for clarity. The Millions: In 2017, you finally won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for a collection of your life's work, Half-Light: Poems 1965-2016. In the collection were some new poems, including the fourth of your Hours of the Night sequence. What brought you to a fifth poem in that sequence, and to this next book, Against Silence, besides the obvious urge as poet to never stop? Frank Bidart: That's very important, the urge to never stop. There are at least two patterns that happen after one finishes a book. Either the barrel is empty and one has to wait for it to fill back up, or, if one is lucky, one starts out in some new direction, and one knows one can't fulfill it in the context of the time one has to publish a book, so one puts it off. That happened to me here. There was a poem I published in The New Yorker called "Mourning What We Thought We Were," and it appeared in the issue the week that Trump was inaugurated. It's a poem that mattered to me tremendously, but I knew in my bones that it needed other poems around it. It needed to be fleshed out. It needed development. So I did not include it in my collected poems, which came out the following year. In other words, I had this poem that was the promise of other things, but was only that. It needed a world of experience and a lot of other writing to back it up, to provide an earth for it to settle on. In that sense, I was lucky, because I had then a beginning. I did not know if I could develop it, but I had a beginning. And that's really what this book is; it very much proceeded from the attempt to provide the underpinnings for that poem. TM: Your work has often interrogated the horrors of history happening in real time, while also undergirding them with historical precedents and instilling the writing with the personal as well. (I'm thinking specifically of your poetry about the AIDS crisis.) In this book, you're looking at American failure, and human failure writ large, and the possibility of where that will go from where it is right now, and you're looking at these subjects in a way that is both expansive and tied into the personal. How did you balance those things? FB: You know Carolyn Forché’s work, and you know her anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. I agreed with her that it was important that poets witness what they knew, what they experienced—that they not think poetry was only lyric. But on the other hand, what had I witnessed? I was not in Vietnam. I had nothing new to say about Vietnam. It was easy to write an anti-Vietnam poem with a lot of secondhand opinions, but I had nothing to contribute in that way. But I was genuinely shocked when, with Trump, suddenly, white supremacy seemed something that had raised its head. You know, I really thought that was dead. And suddenly, I realized it wasn't dead. As the poem reports, I felt things that I thought were over were not over. And on issues of race, as I thought about it, in fact, I had experienced things that were worth talking about. In some ways, everything in the book proceeds from the experience, in the poem "The Fifth Hour of the Night," of my grandmother refusing to let me, at the age of seven or eight, have dinner at the house of a Black friend. I can remember so vividly the rage I felt at her, at her racism—that it was not a question that I could even argue with her about. I was ashamed of the fact that, at the age of seven or eight, I gave in. I buckled under. My mother and I lived in my grandmother's house, and I could not fight her at the age of seven or eight. The book does not go into this, but later in my mother's life, this was a very real issue. She worked in a doctor's office and was very important in it. She ran it. She had very good relations with the doctors, and it was crucial to her sense of her own value. Dr. Zary was a Lebanese Christian, and my mother wanted to marry him. He was dark skinned, and my grandmother—the same woman who I had fought at the age of seven or eight—simply threw a fit. She could not stand the idea that her daughter was going to marry somebody with dark skin, though he was Christian. She talked my mother out of this. It was one of the central tragedies of my mother's life. My mother gave in, and later, she married someone from Texas who was, unfortunately, a very stupid man, and it was a very unhappy marriage. She never should have given into my grandmother. These issues about race had been lived out in my family, and lived out in my own experience, and lived out in what happened to my mother, and in the shape of her life.  TM: As they are reflected here, they take a look at something that a good deal of your poetry interrogates, which is the feeling of guilt over something over which you are powerless. As an eight-year-old, you have no power to tell your grandmother, "Stop being racist, my friend is coming over," and as a survivor of the AIDS crisis, you had no ability to save the people you loved nor choice over whether you survived. So what has come of this interrogation, besides many books of beautiful poetry? Do you feel like there is any exorcism? Is exorcism possible? Do the poems assuage the guilt at all?  FB: The guilt doesn't go away. But on the other hand, it changes. The fact that one can feel guilt over something that one had no control over. There's the survivor's guilt of AIDS. Why on earth did I survive rather than someone else? There's nothing that they did that I didn't do. TM: And with race, it's a question of, "Why was I protected from this pain and this persecution when others were not?" FB:  That's right: why have I lived a very privileged life? And I know I've lived a privileged life—because my grandparents came here from the Pyrenees in 1905, because of things my father did in earning money. There are a million ways in which one is the recipient of privilege that one has done nothing to earn. That's absolutely the nature of our experience. The fact is, one feels guilty for things that one cannot control. I feel guilt for the irreconcilable things in my relationship with my mother for which I was not altogether responsible. Nonetheless, I felt an anger toward her that I could never entirely get over. That was a source of division between us. That's the nature of human experience. TM: That parallel shows up in a lot of your work, the inextricable nature of hate and love and the inextricable nature of life and death. FB:  The irony is, of course, that intellectually one knows these things. But in terms of experience, one discovers them over and over again. That's partly one of the things this book is about: discovering, again, and again, the inextricable relation between love and hate, which I certainly knew about conceptually, but have had to experience over and over again. TM: I think back often to words that you use frequently in your work—to your eye toward the balance between Latinate and Germanic diction, and in the way you use such words as "incommensurate" and "irreparable," words that you come back to very often. I was thinking about those two words while I read this book, specifically, because it interrogates both of them as you define them, and because sometimes they can be one in the same. And I was thinking of how you come back to ideas and words again and again, to learn the same lesson from them in a slightly different way. It's almost natural that we get a "Fifth Hour of the Night" here. That sequence of poems is one of the great through lines of your work. But here we are with one that, unlike a lot of the prior entries, isn't centered on a historical figure—unless you consider yourself a historical figure. What brought you to write this poem? How did you decide to include it in the Hours of the Night sequence?  FB: As in the poem, I started writing about that experience: They love each other more than anything and their child knows that. They love each other more than anything but the well is poisoned. Thirst no well can satisfy. The well of affection that bloods the house is poisoned. Love that bloods the house is poisoned. He was smart and good-looking and charmed everyone. She was beautiful and smart and charmed everyone. Deep wrongness between the two that somehow no fury can wipe clean. That was one of my earliest experiences. That's really what I felt as a child—that somehow, for this family that outwardly seemed happy, there was something deeply wrong that they could not cure, for which loving each other was not enough. Those lines sort of popped out, and in that sense, the trajectory of the poem grew from that. Each hour attempts to talk about some process that is fundamental. That was, in a way, the fundamental process that I experienced as a child. That had to be in the sequence. TM: It's a particularly powerful moment in the book because it crystallizes something you've been writing about for your entire life, which is this tension between love and hate and the irreconcilability of how humans care and hurt each other no matter how much they care. How has your perspective on that duality changed over the course of your career? Do you think that this book agrees with your Odi et Amo series, or do you think it takes a different tack? FB: It takes it in a slightly different direction. The minute, as a graduate student, I read Odi et Amo, I felt that it was the quintessential thing I had ever read: that in two lines, Catullus crystallized this utterly fundamental thing, that we love and hate at the same time, that we love and hate the same thing at the same time. And in a way, I've spent my life trying to excavate that. TM: Desire wants to both create and obliterate. FB: Absolutely. These are two tercets in "Fifth Hour." Let me read them: Sleeping in a motel with my father, when he, in anguish and crying, implored me to try to get my mother to return to him, • I said I / would,– ...and knew I wouldn't. That I can remember as if I'm right there in the bed with my father at the age of five or six. I can remember feeling that. My mother was not going to go back to him. My mother didn't want to go back to him. It was too painful. In that sense, I didn't want him to go back to her either. It would have solved nothing. And at the same time, I wanted to give him some reassurance. I certainly didn't want to say that my finger was on the scale. I said that I would, and I knew I wouldn't. That's like a knife cutting into me. TM: It's like the blood that spills from which soldiers spring, right? In "The Ghost," you write, "guilt is fecund." It sums up a lot of what your work is about: the agony of having to remember these things is not blotted out by the fact that the memory allows the work—which exists and, in its way, becomes a release in as much as it remains the bars by which the guilt is trapped. FB:  There's a history behind that title that I love. Sextus Propertius wrote a poem about Cynthia, whom he loved and who returned to him as a ghost after her death. She partly excoriates him for their relationship. Robert Lowell translated the poem under the title "The Ghost." In my mind, the speaker of my poem "The Ghost" is the side of my mother that is ferocious, forever in a sense unreconciled, but which also can see, somehow, both sides of everything. I loved giving the title "The Ghost" to this poem in which she speaks, because it had the echoes of both Propertius and Lowell's great translation.  TM: When I was reading it, I wondered if it was your mother, and then I wondered if it was personified guilt. FB:  In some sense it is. But it's also my mother. Those are not the words my mother could actually have uttered, or would utter if she were alive, but in some sense it's the quintessence of part of her. It's the tough part of her, that part they could acknowledge guilt as fecund. TM: Another word you love! Let's go back to how you've made certain words your own. I'm thinking now of the poet and educator Richard Hugo’s collection of lectures and essays, The Triggering Town. In it, he writes that "your obsessions lead you to your vocabulary," essentially arguing that poets must "take emotional ownership of...a word," even if those words aren't the most impressive or most important, in order for the poetry to be anything more than a finely wrought thing that belongs to no one. We've discussed "incommensurate" and "irreparable" and "fecund"—these are words that you've made yours, just as you've wrought the phrase "the absolute" into your own concept. What brought you to them, and what brings you back to them so often? FB: They're words that somehow carry within them more than their denotative meaning. They're words that recur to one because they have a kind of weight and density that can't be exhausted by any one utterance of them, or any one context. I think that Hugo sentiment is wonderful, because it's true. They're not always glamorous words, they're not always the most superficially eloquent words. But these words have within them some density of feeling, and of desire, and of failure, that therefore become what we want to call poetic. Someone who was an absolute master of this was Robert Lowell. He found words and kept them and gave them a context in which they had the right density and resonance. TM: Lowell is a good person to talk about in general because, although your verse shares very few surface-level similarities with his, as poets, you are preoccupied with many of the same things: agony, atonement, family, history, self-examination. And, of course, you had a personal relationship with him.  FB: First of all, I loved him. I don't at all mean sexually. Though I'm gay, I was certainly not attracted to him sexually. I knew his work way before I met him. Life Studies had meant a great deal to me before I met him. When I first was in a room with him, it was a classroom, and I couldn't believe I was in his presence. I was also so shocked that this person whom I had read, who was from New England, had a slightly Southern accent. I had not anticipated that. I loved the fact that I was useful to him. That I could understand the prosody from the inside. I didn't want to imitate it, but I could make suggestions that were useful to him. He wanted someone to tell him the truth as they experienced his work. He did not want someone who was simply going to praise him. He did not find that useful. But I could make suggestions that he found useful. That this person I so admired valued me was a tremendous event in my life. It's almost incomprehensible. That feeling that I was indeed an artist and could talk to another artist that I so admired in a way that was useful to him. I really can't tell you enough how important that was for me. My relationship with my own father was very screwed up. In some ways, that Lowell could be an analogue to that, but that it could be a relationship that I did not screw up mattered to me tremendously. I was very, very, very lucky. Lowell did not make suggestions about my own poems. He did not understand my prosody. And I did not expect him to, but he was not threatened by the fact that, in general, he often took suggestions I made about his work, and he did not make suggestions about my work that were useful to me. He was not threatened by that. He found it funny. He was really a very wise man, in many ways. He was someone who had terrible breakdowns and when he was ill, mentally, he was really ill. But in other ways, he was really very wise, very humane. And with me, incredibly generous. I adored him. TM: Inspiration and influence, it seems, are often slant. That is, for instance, Lowell didn't have to edit your poems or provide you with feedback for you to have been influenced not just by reading him, but by knowing him. When you were writing your first book, before Lowell died, how did his poetry change you without changing your prosody? FB: The work was openly ambitious in terms of what it took on, in terms of subject matter, and I loved that. But when he took on something ambitious, he always connected it to his own experience. That seemed, to me, to be completely fundamental to why it worked. TM: One of the most powerful parts of your work is its confessional aspect, and confessionalism has proven to be among the most influential strains of American poetry over the past 50 years. A good portion of the contemporary poetry being fêted in our time is a poetry of identity—poetry that explicitly interrogates personal and gender and racial and sexual identity. You are very openly and movingly a gay poet, but would you call yourself a poet of identity? FB: No, I certainly wouldn't! TM: You are, however, a very personal poet. But your interest in identity and the personal is less central than your interest in art, death, love, hate, compulsion to write, curiosity even in taking on the identities of others. FB: I was very much formed by Shakespeare as a kind of model of the artist. Shakespeare is the greatest writer—it really is Shakespeare. He was not an Egyptian, and he was not a Danish Prince, or any of these things, literally. And he could inhabit the minds, sensibilities, perspectives, and worlds of these characters. He never treats them as merely creatures of their circumstances. He always connects them to what one wants to call universal human experience. That's what I think an artist does. And as one goes through one's own experience, one wants to catch something from history or psychology, or one wants to be caught by something. There's an illusion of freedom in that that is thrilling. When I was an undergraduate, I received from the Reader's Subscription a book called Existence, which included an essay by Dr. Ludwig Binswanger called "The Case of Ellen West." I immediately identified with her. I immediately wanted to write a poem about her. I was not old enough. I did not know how to do that. But that lay in my mind for a long, long time, and finally, about 15 years later, I was able to write a poem in which she speaks. I felt very grateful to have known the Binswanger. And I was grateful that I couldn't write my poem when I first read it. TM: Did you think you needed to grow into the poem in some ways? FB: At the time, all I knew was that I couldn't possibly write the poem that would embody her. But I think that is indeed what happened, that I had to grow into that. I had to experience a lot of other things. I had to experience the singing of Maria Callas. I had to have my own battles with being overweight, and a desire not to be. Everything that went into making that poem I had to grow into. I do think you can't have a narrow view of what an artist is. An artist is not someone who simply transcribes his or her experience. An artist is someone with a sympathetic imagination—sympathetic meaning identifying with ways of being that are not literally one's own. TM: And your work does that in both a personal, confessional manner, as you do in "Mourning What We Thought We Were" and "The Fifth Hour of the Night," and by animating historical figures whose experiences move you, as you did with Ellen West, and Vaslav Nijinsky, and Herbert White and, in "Behind the Lion" in this collection, Sidney Bechet. FB: All the words in that poem are Sidney Bechet's! None of them are mine. But I think I was able to inhabit the sensibility that resulted in his writing at that time, or his speech at that time. All this bears on my relationship to Lowell, because when I wrote "The War of Vaslav Nijinsky," Lowell was alive. It's a poem that for a long time was in manuscript, but I had not set it up on paper. I could not get the movement right on the page, in terms of punctuation and stanza breaks and all those things. I got stuck in a passage for about two years. I just could not get it right. I could not get the words on the page to embody the voice that I heard in my head, and the voice with which I read the poem. I was worried because Nijinsky was someone who had mental breakdowns, and who did, in fact, violent things when he was ill. One night, at the Blacksmith House in Cambridge, Mass., I read the poem aloud, and Lowell was present. I was worried that he would think that I was writing about him—and I knew that I wasn't. Whatever insights that poem has about mental illness and breakdowns did not in any way proceed from my experience of Lowell. After I read the poem in public, we talked, and I told him that I was worried that he would think that I was writing about him. He said, "No, no, no, no. It's about you." Of course, he was completely right! All the extremities of emotion, all the imagination of how things are connected, have to do with my experience. Not literally, but psychologically and mentally and emotionally. I was so pleased that he could see that it was not him that was the subject of that poem, but me. TM: It's fascinating that you frame this this way, because I was going to ask if, when you inhabit another—in the way that you do with Nijinsky or West or White—does it feel freeing, or does it feel once again like being cursed to carry a mind and a body that you cannot escape from in another form? FB: Well, it's both freeing and cursing! One feels the curse of an identity. But at least it's not one's own identity. Identity can indeed feel like a curse. As it does to Nijinsky and Ellen West, in many ways. They are not free. And I have no illusion that I'm free, except insofar as I can inhabit them, and that only occurs in the writing. TM: You can't escape being Frank Bidart. And you cannot escape the society you are in—nor can your childhood friend, whose presence in your life your grandmother raged against as a child, escape being perceived as Black in a country that hates Blackness, even though that should not matter whatsoever as to how he is treated as a human being. A number of these poems are more explicitly political than even your poems on AIDS. What brought you to writing these poems in this way, and putting them in this context? The Trump election inspired you, of course, but what made you, say, write poems on racial relations and climate change in this fashion? FB: Let me say, the poems did not feel different in kind to me from my earlier poems. Let me take the second poem, "At the Shore": Since childhood, you hated the illusion that this green and pleasant land inherently is green or pleasant or for human beings home. Whoever dreamed that had not, you thought, experienced the earth. It felt like a relief to find the words that could say that, but I have felt that way for a very long time. Behind this is obviously the Blake poem about England being this green and pleasant land. That poem, of course, objects to what's happened to England in Blake's time. I admire and envy that poem on one hand, but my experience is not that something that was green, pleasant, and pristine has been defiled, which is Blake's experience—it is that the Earth was never those things. I felt relief to find words that could state that feeling that the Earth is not our home. And of course, the Earth is our home. There's a line in a later poem..."mind at war with ground." The earth is our ground, but we are at war with our ground. In a million ways. TM: Still, it is impossible for a reader in 2021 to read that poem and not think, "This is Frank Bidart's climate change poem." The same way that, when you read "Mourning What We Thought We Were," you think, "This is Frank Bidart's poem on race." FB: These are things that I had felt very deeply before, and never found the context in which to utter them. TM: And so you had to put it into words, even knowing that what is past is past, that you cannot change anything about which you have written by feeling guilt, that you can only write the poems, and that even that solves nothing for you or them. FB: Well, it's something. It's better than not having realized such things. TM: This book is filled with such realizations, and ends with one. "On My Seventy-Eighth," the final poem of the book, incorporates a number of the themes found in all of your other work, and deals explicitly with not just loss, but with the acknowledgement that even loss isn't loss—that we carry with us even what is gone from us.  FB: The last thing I did with the poem was to work in the reference to the end of Hamlet: "the rest is silence" is the last thing that Hamlet says, and I was writing a book called Against Silence, and I did not have that reference. This is a very good example of having worked with Lowell. He loved giving a poem a kind of density through illusion. The poem was published in Threepenny Review, without the lines: Intolerable the fiction the rest is silence. And I suddenly felt I could not publish a book called Against Silence without reference to Hamlet's last words. Not only is it a very famous ending, it is something that the whole play, of course, contradicts. The rest is not silence after death. The first thing that happens in the play is that the father appears to the son, and the dead do speak in that play. In my book—insofar as it's against silence—in "The Ghost," my mother speaks, and she's dead. It's not as simple as "the rest is silence." That was the last thing I did not just to the poem, but to the book. It was a very Lowell-like thing to do. TM: What do you hope readers will take away from this poem, and from this book? FB: You know, I want the reader to say, "He's not senile." [millions_email]