One of the first things I did this year was finish the frozen baked goods I had in my fridge, and then for my own sanity, promised myself I would never buy baked goods in insane quantities again, and then, again, for my own sanity, crawled to the grocery on a wet Saturday for a surprise pie and turnover disaster. The rhubarb-strawberry hybrid pies from the Irresistibles must really not be all that irresistible because I pick it up every time I get my to-go bag of near expired’s.
I started the year with Quarterlife by Satya Doyle Byock, which I was drawn to because it was the beginning of the year and 23 was hurtling towards me. I felt it was exactly what it said on the cover but was disappointed, still. I think we expect self help books to fix us immediately. It’s what makes them marketable. Still, I feel like a lot of twenty somethings will feel seen by this book.
This, then Alien vs. Predator by Michael Robbins, which I was bothered by but then interested in but then bothered by, again. I was trying to capture the feeling of wonder I felt when I first read his poem, Walkman, but I think he was trying to do something different in Alien that make them hard to compare. Then, for the first book club read of 2023, The Last Summer in the City by Gianfranco Calligarich, which read like a beachside Great Gatsby, with the same blue feeling running through the whole thing.
Nobody to whom a thing like that happens can return home exactly as he was before. In spite of his proud silence, it always seemed as if he was trying to make us forget something, perhaps the fact he’d come home a shattered man and had made us watch his big body writhing as the electric shocks shuddered through it. Anyway, that’s how he was, and when I was a boy I could never forgive him for his unheroic profession, his love of order, his excessive respect for inanimate things, not understanding what terrible destruction he must have witnessed to then set about repairing an old kitchen chair with infinite patience on the very day he came back from the war.
Gianfranco Calligarich, Last Summer in the City
On the subway I finished Franz Wright’s God’s Silence, which had some gorgeous poems. Like Jane Hirshfield1, he has a way of using these big, ambitious, regal words that doesn’t annoy me. A part of On the Bus, one of the first poems in the collection:
It's one thing when you're twenty-one,
and I was way past twenty-one.
With unshaven face half concealed in the collar
of some deceased porcine philanthropist's
black cashmere rag of a coat,
I knew that I looked like a suicide
returning an overdue book to the library.
Almost everyone else did as well,
but I found no particular solace in this;
at best, the fact awakened some diverting speculations
on the comparative benefits
of waiting in front of a ditch to be shot
alone or in company
of others, and then whether one would prefer
these last hypothetical others
to be friends, family, enemies, total
or relative strangers. Would you hold hands?
Or would you rather like a good Homo sapiens
monster employ them
to cover your genitals?
It was a weird, sad month. It was good to read.
girl who has read one jane hirshfield book: getting a lot of jane hirshfield vibes from this