It’s times like these—early September, the start of the semester, the twilight of another year—that I remember I am rarely this thing called myself. Hardly a month ago I moved to a new city in a new state, where I knew no one and no one knew me. With the start of classes came the kind of haphazard schedule only academia can provide. I mean to say this new way of living is not altogether foreign, but also only loosely familiar, like the cousin of a friend you haven’t spoken to in years. Whoever I thought I would be when I got here has yet to arrive, and whoever I was before getting here seems, in many ways, a memory. But this is so often the case.
Among various syllabi and reading lists, I have been trying to ground myself in books of my own choosing. Partially as an exercise of free will, and partially in an attempt to navigate new quiets, I’ve been reading in ways I never have. From toddlerhood to a month ago, I never could’ve read more than one book at a time; I never could have started a new book before finishing or fully resigning myself from the one I’d already begun. Be it for a lack of time or an embarrassment of riches, I’ve been in the middle of no less than three at once since moving. Now, at the time of my writing, my attention is broken across five. I’ve read and reread two for years, both coming back to me at this vital time, and three are new discoveries quickly claiming real estate among my favorites. I’m grateful for them all.
The first of these: Lucie Brock-Broido’s incantatory final collection Stay, Illusion. In ways, it is a book that I’m always reading. I shelve it only rarely, and so it is most often wandering from open table to open table in my apartment, where it is picked up and thumbed through near-daily. Mostly accidentally, and as a result of this perpetual revisiting, I’ve memorized many of the book’s poems, which flit in and out of my mind as they please. In one of those poems better-known, entitled “You Have Harnessed Yourself Ridiculously to This World,” Brock-Broido writes, “We have come to terms with our Self / Like a marmoset getting out of her Great Ape suit.” That movement is the kind I’m most taken by, and the kind Brock-Broido makes again and again.
The book’s title is no accident—though I’m not sure I’d believe anything Brock-Broido ever did was accidental—constantly, in poem after poem, the self is conjured, transfigured, and willed to remain. In “A Girl Ago” she writes, “I was sixteen for twenty years. By September I will be a ghost,” and on the next page, she finishes the poem “Two Girls Ago,” with “No threat. In the table of contents I’m not dead yet.” My copy was a gift, given to me by a mentor on the occasion of her passing. Rarely am I so utterly devastated and rarely am I so overcome by wonder than when Stay, Illusion runs the course of my mind. To say everything and nothing of the poems as they are, this is the book I open to return to myself, to read and remember where I am.
Zachary Doss and his impeccably delightful collection of stories, Boy Oh Boy, have a similarly tragic provenance in my life. Another beloved teacher of mine showed me a story at the very start of my life as a writer. The story was Doss’s “Bespoke,” the winner of Puerto Del Sol’s 2016 fiction contest. I was enraptured, and I wanted to read all of his writing that I could, but Doss, too, was at the start of his career, and there was little I could find that I could access with ease. Hardly a week later, I was the first student to walk into the small letterpress studio where we held class, and shortly thereafter that teacher and I were crying together for his passing. The next year, Boy Oh Boy won the Grace Paley Prize and was eventually published by Red Hen Press.
We were far from the only two to mourn his passing, and Black Warrior Review’s online Boyfriend Village stands as an exemplar memorial to him and his work. The story for which Boyfriend Village is named, “The Village with All of the Boyfriends,” is the final story of Boy Oh Boy. To choose only one is an impossible task, but if forced, I’d not be ashamed if I had to say “The Village” is my favorite. In its conclusion, Doss writes “Everywhere the boyfriends are too much weight pressing down on the houses, the General Store, the Bank, the Laundromat, the Taqueria. Out on the edge of town you are bow-legged with the strain of it. You are waiting for a foundation to crack.”
Now, I know how I sound, but I’m not all devastation and impending doom—not right now. How you read the boyfriends of Doss’s stories is up to you. To call the collection anything less than exuberant would be a lie. I take his endless boyfriends to be joys, glimmers—so many objet petit we’re crushed under the weight of desire. I think it’s a nice place to be, plenty of somethings to strive for.
Taking on landscapes less imagined, The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice, graciously edited by Shara Lessley and Bruce Snider, is an anthology I let sit unopened on my shelf for far too long. For some time now, I’ve been held fast by Joy Priest’s suggestion that there is no poem that is not a “place poem,” a poem beholden to its geography. The Poem’s Country gives shape to that idea. I’ve not yet sat with it and indulged myself cover-to-cover the way I intend, but with each essay I find what might best be called my “poetic worldview” expanding. I find old poems taking on new meaning and new poems greeting me with something akin to open arms. I am indebted to the text most for its directives, as in Monica Youn’s essay, “On Blackacre,” where she asks “What are the limits of the imagination’s ability to transform what is given?” Regardless of whether an answer is necessary or possible, there is an authority in her asking and a freedom in anyone’s willingness to find out.
Having read, now, somewhere just beyond its middle, I feel just fine saying Morgan Parker’s Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night is a book that takes that kind of freedom and runs with it. It’s an impassioned debut (first from Switchback in 2015, reissued last year by Tin House) and one I’d like to finish for its brilliance and finish again many times over. There is nothing of the text I can say that Danez Smith does not say better in their introduction. Morgan Parker is “as timeless as a person can get,” they write, “I don’t mean old school cause there’s too much future here, and I also don’t wanna remove possibility from the past. I mean there is a long sense of time and lineage in these poems.” It’s a sense exemplified in poems like “Everyone Knows Where Art Comes from It Comes from the Store,” which Parker ends “I could pick a billion flowers for your sick bed. / Do you see me I could dance all night” and in “There Are Other Things I Want to Explain but They Are Mysteries,” which asks, “what do you think of the idea of progress / and is it an injury I can fix.” I’m transfixed by Parker’s incisive wit, and even having expressed my desire to finish it over and over again, it’s the kind of book I don’t think I’ll ever read fast enough to reach the end. Every next poem calls me back to the ones before.
Eric A. Stanley’s Atmospheres of Violence is the final book in this rotation, and it’s one that, not unlike Parker, gives an astonishing view of culture’s long arcs. I admit that I’m only past its introduction, but for the way Stanley situates his text among monolithic scholars—chief among them Angela Davis, Jose Esteban Muñoz, and Frantz Fanon—I have a suspicion this may be the rare, energizing read that compels me to its end without interruption. In his words, “this is a study of the shattering power that threatens, and at times erupts into the deadly force that not only kills but makes life unlivable—an atmosphere of violence.” The text rails against normativity and assimilation, “argu[ing] that inclusion, rather than a precondition of safety, most properly names the state’s violent expansion.” But alongside the analysis of empire and histories of queer resistance, I take one of Stanley’s core questions to heart: “How does an impasse become yet another door?” Again I’m without a definite answer, but there are gestures toward it in these texts, I’m sure, and in the search I hope to make good on whatever we might say has been lost.
JUSTIN NASH is a first-year poet and visual artist from Delaware. A former intern for Copper Canyon Press and the Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown, he currently serves as a Writing Center Consultant and is a Senior Reader in Poetry for Cherry Tree. Find him on twitter @lochnashmonster.
