bone -Yrsa Daley-Ward

My fiancee found this particular collection on Amazon, and recommended it highly. I’ve been reading a lot more contemporary poetry in the last few years, but it’s still very much unfamiliar ground for me. bone is an independently published collection of poetry, available both in print and at a very attractive price as a Kindle Edition (which is how we read it). Almost all self/”independently”-published poetry collections are very bad, but bone is clearly one of those exceptions that prove the rule.

Yrsa Daley-Ward’s poetry is both lyrical and highly narrative, reminiscent in effect, if not in style, of Raymond Carver’s story-poems. These poems are autobiographical, and together they function not only as verse but as memoir. They are very, very good, and they hit you like something with some serious kinetic density. Much like reading Cormac McCarthy, I had to stop and sit for a while after many of these individual poems, and again after finishing the collections and feeling their collective weight.

While there is no doubt an interesting conversation to be had about Amazon, about publishing in general and the self-publishing of poems in particular, I don’t want to talk about that right now. However this collection made it out into the world, it did, and it’s fantastic -this has become my new all-time favorite collection of contemporary poetry. I tried to contact Yrsa Daley-Ward to express my feelings of admiration and to inquire as to where I could obtain here previously published short story collection, (out of print and unavailable) but she only seems to be available on Twitter. Maybe this means I’ll have to take the plunge and Tweet myself.

Recommendation: Go buy it, go read it! Fucking hell, these poems are good.

“Time and Distance Overcome” by Eula Biss

This is easily the best essay collection I’ve read this year. I had previously encountered Biss reading Volume 1 of Best Creative Nonfiction, as well as on the wonderful podcast Book Fight, which I have recommended before and plan to again. Her work always stood out to me, but there’s a lot of good writing out there, and it took me a while to get to her. The project of reading fifty female authors this year probably expiated that, and I’m glad.

These essays deal with identity, specifically the search for identity in race and nationality. Biss, who is white, has grown up with black family members, and has developed a nuanced and piercing sense of racial examination. Whether she is pondering her time as a teacher in Harlem, examining her own role in the gentrification of a mixed Chicago neighborhood, or feeling shame at her American identity in a Mexican border town, she cuts through the obfuscatious bullshit and forces both herself and her readers to face some profoundly unpleasant truths.

While this description may sound like some unpleasantly sanctimonious lefty academic hand-wringing, the only thing it has in common with that unfortunate genre of academic writing is its subject. In the title essay, Biss talks about the history of lynching in America within the context of the invention of the telephone and the implementation of the ubiquitous poles that made phone lines possible, and their inevitable incorporation into the systemic terrorizing and murder of black men. It’s a masterful piece of writing that is simultaneously approachable enough for me to teach it to my 8th grade class (most of who read at least a few grades levels below 8th grade) and dense enough to not only stand up to a half-dozen readings, but to thrive under that degree of scrutiny, offering greater nuance and detail.

Recommendation: Buy this book. If you are undecided, read the essay mentioned above (link below).

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102235226#102237046