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josephtrinidad115's review
5.0
as_a_tre3's review
5.0
crookedtreehouse's review against another edition
2.0
The page where my interest was lost,
premier and pretentious,
a great grey gust of gibberish.
Phileas Fogged down in the derails.
Do you remember when we named the dog
Indiana? A wooden chalice chosen holy?
On the red line to work the other day
I saw people whose skin color was not
the same as mine, and that didn't tell me
anything deep about who they were
as people. I did not try and imagine
who they were. I did not smugly appropriate
their experiences. Whether or not they're American
is not important. I hope they had a phenomenal day
in the wondrous weather. Unless they're jerks.
Then, I hoped they all stubbed all of their toes.
Last night in the undulating darkness of the thesaurused night
my unconcsciousness theatred a script of fancy.
I shan't describe it to you.
Orwell says happiness can only exist in acceptance.
I am jubilant that this book is not for me.
II.
My eyes are in the text while
my heart is in the kitchen
the bedroom
on a beach somewhere with a better book.
The exasperating sea of prose
summed up by the coda
where the writer admits having nothing interesting to say.
He wins awards for writing about how he doesn't know how to write
beginnings or endings. The middles are choppy, too.
III.
The difference between experience and writing about
experience is more than perspective.
Is more than let me tell you.
Is more than show.
No matter how much I enjoy a turkey
and cheese sandwich, no matter my fascination with
the post-credit adventures in Super Mario Odyssey,
if all I have to say is ass bounce reveals moon
twinkling over top hat
while the crumbs catch in my goatee,
then that is all I should say.
I'm not sure how to start
telling you how much I enjoy
sitting in the solitude of my air
conditioned house collecting purple
snowflakes while the turkey and cheese
sandwich that I am unsure how to describe
sits on the plate whose importance I am having
trouble describing to you reminds me of a dream
I'm not going to tell you about because I lack
the ability makes me wish I was white water
rafting while this book fell behind the shelves,
confusing the lonely spider.
****************************************
I recommend it for people who enjoy New Yorker poetry, for people who feel deep for reading award winning books, and the kind of people who go way over time reading to bored audiences at open mics.
babsduff's review
5.0
anushree's review
4.0
And days afterward, after I have felt the curious release from being human
that these faces give me, and have been
drowned in them and resurrected and drowned again
on the verge of some other sleep, I will be sitting at a meeting
or on the subway,
or in the Greek coffee shop around the corner where I sometimes eat breakfast,
and someone will give me a look, and I will look back
at his or her face and think, Didn't I see that in a trance?
And I did, I did, I did see it in a trance.
4.5 stars. A delighted find after searching Pulitzer Prize winners, stopping after seeing a South Asian name. The poems parse the mind-blowing aspects of existence into the most precise definitions and pieces, from the manufacturing of silk to the almost frenetic energy of Personal Memoir, which takes the unspeakable and unknowable and somehow makes it into prose concrete.
Threes are everywhere- three persons, three apocalyptic visions, three Urdu poems, three sections. The style weaves together the mundane and extraordinary, proclaiming them to be the same. I loved the straightforward writing of Pacific Fishes of Canada, which both gave me chills but also provided a contrast to the rest of the collection, showing me how exactly poetry uses its outsized style to create sentiment. Definitely took some effort to read, though. Still grappling with the technicalities of reading poetry.