Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion
The Insanity Defense, Woody Allen
In Persuasion Nation, George Saunders
Sure Signs, Ted Kooser
The poems in Ted Kooser's Sure Signs describe the weathered highways, airy houses, and fading light of middle America. The collection suffers slightly from the affliction of most American poetry these days: an embrace of a gray-tinted world of melancholy, aimlessness, and disconnection occasionally punctured by clear, sunny rays of truth or starry, crystalline moments of wonder. This sensibility doesn't lack in truth or charm, it just gets a little heavy sometimes.
That said, Kooser's poems are light and plain, and evoke from quiet, creaky farmhouses, diners, old age homes, and straight, gray highways bits of meaning and magic. Occasionally mundane, usually engaging, Sure Signs is a nice, slim volume to stick in your coat pocket or messenger bag and dip in and out of on short rides on the subway. Check out Kooser's website for a sneak preview.
The lasting impressions of Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays are of a once-glamorous woman dissolving into vodka and cigarettes, laying in her bed, in the middle of the afternoon, of a sun-bleached and center-less Hollywood where the mechanics of depravity and despair are as natural as those of creativity and fame, and a fading vision of a long lost Las Vegas, of hopeful losers. Cold and brutal, the novel is a hangover, the inflection between the sweet drift into oblivion and the painful, clarifying climb out. Didion's powerful but easy prose conveys America's loss of innocence (although it seems that , in literature at least, our innocence is constantly being lost) from the heights of promise, and as I've written, is well worth the read.
An article that I read recently claimed that people rarely laugh out loud by themselves, that laughing is a social activity. It is, I suppose, a consequence of their unique literary voices that allow writers like George Saunders and Woody Allen to make you feel like they are with you, telling you their stories, that makes it OK to laugh out loud when reading their stories alone. At least I did. Since I've already spent time on both collections of stories, I will limit my comments to a simple endorsement: if you are looking for stories that are funny, smart, strange, and thoughtful either of In Persuasion Nation or The Insanity Defense will serve you well.
The Insanity Defense, Woody Allen
In Persuasion Nation, George Saunders
Sure Signs, Ted Kooser
"Every stranger's tolerance for poetry is compromised by much more important demands on his or her time. Therefore, I try to honor my reader's patience and generosity by presenting what I have to say as clearly and succinctly as possible .... Also, I try not to insult the reader's good sense by talking down; I don't see anything to gain by alluding to intellectual experiences that the reader may not have had. I do what I can to avoid being rude or offensive; most strangers, understandably, have a very low tolerance for displays of pique or anger or hysteria. Being harangued by a poet rarely endears a reader. I am also extremely wary of over cleverness; there is a definite limit to how much intellectual showing off a stranger can tolerate."- Ted Kooser, Midwest Quarterly, 1999 (from Wikipedia)There are two occasions when I find reading poetry to be particularly pleasurable and useful: when I am living in a quiet suburban or rural home with a patio or porch and time on my hands, and while riding a train on the New York City subway system. In both cases, a good collection of poems, simple, direct, evocative poems are the perfect fodder for a restless mind. The consumption of poems that are lyrical but recognizable, with resonant themes, subjects, and enjoyable turns of phrase is, to me, very gratifying.
The poems in Ted Kooser's Sure Signs describe the weathered highways, airy houses, and fading light of middle America. The collection suffers slightly from the affliction of most American poetry these days: an embrace of a gray-tinted world of melancholy, aimlessness, and disconnection occasionally punctured by clear, sunny rays of truth or starry, crystalline moments of wonder. This sensibility doesn't lack in truth or charm, it just gets a little heavy sometimes.
That said, Kooser's poems are light and plain, and evoke from quiet, creaky farmhouses, diners, old age homes, and straight, gray highways bits of meaning and magic. Occasionally mundane, usually engaging, Sure Signs is a nice, slim volume to stick in your coat pocket or messenger bag and dip in and out of on short rides on the subway. Check out Kooser's website for a sneak preview.
The lasting impressions of Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays are of a once-glamorous woman dissolving into vodka and cigarettes, laying in her bed, in the middle of the afternoon, of a sun-bleached and center-less Hollywood where the mechanics of depravity and despair are as natural as those of creativity and fame, and a fading vision of a long lost Las Vegas, of hopeful losers. Cold and brutal, the novel is a hangover, the inflection between the sweet drift into oblivion and the painful, clarifying climb out. Didion's powerful but easy prose conveys America's loss of innocence (although it seems that , in literature at least, our innocence is constantly being lost) from the heights of promise, and as I've written, is well worth the read.
An article that I read recently claimed that people rarely laugh out loud by themselves, that laughing is a social activity. It is, I suppose, a consequence of their unique literary voices that allow writers like George Saunders and Woody Allen to make you feel like they are with you, telling you their stories, that makes it OK to laugh out loud when reading their stories alone. At least I did. Since I've already spent time on both collections of stories, I will limit my comments to a simple endorsement: if you are looking for stories that are funny, smart, strange, and thoughtful either of In Persuasion Nation or The Insanity Defense will serve you well.
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