In Civil Service, Claire Schwartz sheds light onto the dark corner of the world run by power, profit, property, and prisons. Here’s a chilling excerpt from “Lecture on the History of the House”:

Inside the house, a man hits you.
Then you understand:
your body is the window.
Inside, you are already outside.

Next door, the Soloist domesticates a tune.

Poetry is a door without a house.

Theory is productive of the known.
Poetry is productive of the unknown.

How, then, do you know
what is true? These walls, this foundation,
in the pages of glossy magazines.
The newspapers scratch their heads.
Again, the hunters, budgeting.

At the end of the day, you return to what is not common.

It’s a beautiful, powerful collection with some simple line illustrations.

I don’t quite understand her poems. Although she uses plain words, her language is a bit strange. I like a few pieces including “How Kind” and “The Ruins.” I’ll give the collection a reread in the near future.

If you read my brief reviews of poetry books, you can tell that I don’t understand most of the poems. It could be the language barriers or I just don’t get poetry. Fortunately, Richard Blanco, Academy of American Poets education ambassador and Barack Obama’s second inaugural poet, explains the art of reading poetry in the introduction of 100 Poems That Matter, an anthology selected by poets.org. He gives us the license to read poetry without having to understand the meaning behind the work. He writes:

We often listen or sing along to songs without knowing exactly what all the lyrics mean, but we certainly do know how songs make us feel. In other words, we first allow ourselves to experience the feeling of a song, without trying to decipher what it means, precisely. It’s important to initially engage poems in a similar way and accept that, even though we may not fully understand them, we can feel them. If you are deeply moved by even just a few lines from one poem in this book, then you get poetry. Like music, poetry instills in us a complexity of emotions; as we ponder those emotions, we learn the deeper meaning of the poem. What’s more, there are many different styles and periods of poetry, just as there is in music. It would be silly to say that you don’t like music because you heard a song you didn’t like. Yet we often treat poetry this way, as if all poems are the same. Which is to say, give yourself permission to not necessarily love every poem in this collection, though I’m confident you will find at least one that will stir your whole being because we naturally do get poetry in the same way we get music. Read that poem aloud over and over again, the way we repeatedly play our favorite songs and sing along to them. Let the poem sing in you.

I read the entire anthology and found a few favorites. I will be sharing them on this blog. The book design is just lovely. The typesetting is so damn gorgeous.

Reading Richie Hofmann’s reminds me of Ocean Vuong’s. They are both very open about their sexuality. In “Mosquitoes,” Hofmann confesses: “I projected my homosexuality onto everyone.” And he sure did beautifully in A Hundred Lovers with lines such as, “the T-shirt he wiped his penis with,” in “Coquelicot.” I find his poems easy to understand and enjoyable to read.

I read all the poems from Baker’s Whale Fall, but I didn’t fully get them. For example, I like the vibe in “Extinction,” but I am not sure what he’s talking about:

When you are gone they will read your footprints,
if they still read, as they might a poem about love—
wandering in circles, here and there obscured,
washed out in places by weather, sudden landslide.
Keep walking, pilgrim. This is your great tale.

I need to keep learning about poetry by reading more poems.

I read Nicholas Montemarano’s memoir in one sitting and my eyes were watery. My sister and I went through what Nicholas and Jen had gone through. Our mothers fought fiercely against Covid, but they didn’t make it. I captured my experience through my blog posts while Nicholas captured his through poetic prose—what a heartbreakingly beautiful book.

I cried alone like Montemarano had eloquently expressed:

it was easier to cry alone
and I hoped that no one
would walk past and see me
and I hoped that someone
would walk past and see me
and ask are you ok
I prayed that my mother
would remain peaceful
and free from pain
and would be taken soon
though I didn’t want her to be taken
anywhere

Maya C. Popa inspired me to read poetry and to started to post my favorite poems on this blog. I just read through her latest collection in Wound Is the Origin of Wonder. I don’t understand everything she has written, but my favorites are: “Dear Life,” “They Are Building a Hospital,” and “Not the Wound, But What the Wound Implies.” I’ll definitely reread this collection a few more times to see if I can figure out the meaning behind her lyrical poems.

The introduction is an intriguing read. Cường Phạm shares his journey in making his pure, premium fish sauce. The recipes look a-okay. The design and the photography are decent. The sans-serif textface is a missed opportunity. It would be fine for listing the ingredients, but serif typeface for reading text would have been much better.

I first read this book in 2017. I picked up a used copy recently and decided to reread it. Klinkenborg’s prose is so damn good. Here’s his advice on writing:

Learn to write anywhere, at any time, in any conditions,
With anything, starting from nowhere.
All you really need is your head, the one indispensable requirement.

Here’s his advice on editing:

It’s true that the simplest revision is deletion.
But there’s often a fine sentence lurking within a bad sentence,
A better sentence hiding under a good sentence.
Work word by word until you discover it.
Don’t try to fix an existing sentence with minimal effort,
Without reimagining it.
You can almost fix never a sentence—
Or find the better sentence within it—
By using only the words it already contains.
If they were the right words already, the sentence probably wouldn’t need fixing.
And yet writers sit staring at a flawed sentence as if it were a Rubik’s Cube,
Trying to shift the same words round and round until they find the solution.
Take note of this point: it will save you a lot of frustration.
This applies to paragraphs too.
You may not be able to fix the paragraph using only the sentences it already contains.

It’s definitely a book to keep around to improve my writing.

Li’s writing is clear and comprehensible. The pace is a bit slow though. After reading more than 100 pages, I started to lose interest in a 400-page novel. Maybe my interest isn’t in the sexual misconduct behind the film industry. It might be more suitable for relaxing beach reading. I might pick it up again over the summer.