#desesperanto: poems

[llovelymoonn]

on death

marilyn hacker desesperanto: poems 1999-2002: "elegy for a soldier" \\ via @whiskeyandgrit \\ callie siskel mourner's logic (via @serratedpens)

kofi

[thesupersecretbookstore]

This Week’s Expert Picks

This year has been a good [long] day for poetry to absolve anxiety. Mine especially. And Marilyn Hacker's poetics did just that. My friend Brian, who is an outstanding poet himself, sent me a beautiful poem called "Elegy for a Soldier" from Hacker's collection, Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002. And I immediately bought the book from which it lives. To devour it all. Marilyn Hacker is an award-winning poet best known for formal poems that mix high culture and colloquial speech. Over a career spanning nearly 50 years, Hacker has established herself as a preeminent voice. In this collection, her voice is unique in its intelligence, urbanity, its deployment of an elegiac humor, its weaving of literary sources into the fabric and vocabulary of ordinary life, its archaeology of memory. Desesperanto refines the themes of loss, exile, and return that have consistently informed her work. The title itself is a wordplay combining the Spanish word esperanto, signifying "hope," and the French desespoir, meaning "to lose heart." Des-esperanto, then, is a universal language of despair ―despair of the possibility of a universal language. Hacker has defined the dimensions of a poetic universe that she continues to explore. I find her despair comforting. I find her poetry unsettles my heart, reminding me why I love poetry in the first place. Thanks to Brian. Thanks to Marilyn Hacker. RB

This is essential Bukowski, his poignant poetry navigates themes of pain, hate, love, and of beauty. His poetry is so different, it’s short stories in verse. His observations on the deprived world he inhabited.

I always come back to Hank. Something about his writing. As I’ve mentioned no one just likes him, either you love the guy or hate him. Raw poetry is hard to come by anymore, maybe that’s why he speaks to me. This work features some fantastic poems, some of my favorites include: The Shoelace, My Friend William, Mockingbird, and American Matador.

It’s tough and gritty like a piece of beef jerky. But once you taste the sweet poetry you begin to understand. The man was troubled and tortured soul as any, but the plethora of work he released was monumental, thought-provoking, and few have been able to reproduce his style. CJH

I don't get control of the TV at home (I just don't care enough to fight for it) so when I learned MOXIE is a book (after seeing the preview) AND it was available at my local used store (shout out to The Book Rack) I hunkered down with it after having some false starts with other books. I often use YA as a palate cleanser, so to speak.

I hate to say it, it's too obvious, I know, but the book has moxie.

Coming of age stories so often focus their energy on that love interest that changed your life or that summer away from your parents or whatever but this was so much more in touch with humanity than those stories about some *very special experience* that no one really has. The author, Jennifer Mathieu, is a high school teacher and her understanding of teens is excellent. Our narrator, Vivian, is real enough to be the high school best friend you remember both fondly and with mild annoyance. Maybe she's you. Viv is possibly the most well-rendered teen girl I've ever read. Three dimensional, making some choices only a teen would make and some choices you hate to admit you'd have made, too.

Vivian is about the only character who gets this perfect treatment, but I forgive that because everything we see is filtered through Viv's experience. And she very casually, very realistically, explores issues of gender, race, class, immigration, sexuality, and the intersections of feminism in high school.

I have since seen the movie (on my computer, I'll add) and I think they did a beautiful job with it. Most of the changes made were beautiful and deliberate and make it such that much of the movie is a surprise, while remaining true to the novel. There were a few changes I was annoyed by--the adults are too reasonable in the movie for my taste (it felt like they were using kid-gloves and this story is about kids speaking truth to the power, not about kids who don't have to fight the power), I preferred the book's treatment of a side-character love interest--but overall the message was there and told gracefully.

Moxie is my favorite book but it is one that deserves to be read and one that reminds you that the fight is still out there, waiting for you to join. SE