The author is primarily a poet, I think, but the back bills this book as “lyric essay/poetry,” which is an apt characterization. Along with the images sprinkled throughout there are some fragments that are clearly poetry, but most of the text is comprised of paragraphs written like they are from particularly lyrical personal essays. They speak forward in time in a stark personal-political vein from the painful early years of the George W. Bush administration, an era long enough ago and sufficiently shrouded by more recent horrors that even those of us who lived them easily forget how bleak they felt. The text juxtaposes self and world, and seemingly unrelated elements of both, in that way that a certain kind of essay does so powerfully. But the paragraphs, or the groups of paragraphs, flow into one another with a logic that feels more like poetry or a dream – a path following the twists and turns of affect and image. Which I suppose you also sometimes find in essays, but here it is greatly heightened. Not exactly a form that I’m interested in making myself, but oh I wish I could produce sentences and paragraphs like this.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.