stanza my stone

Pick three of dgp’s chapbook titles and get them for only $10 now through November 2nd!

Most life-affirming book about death: Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory (2014) (I reviewed this here)

Most surprising ending, or maybe I am just not very good at predicting endings, but seriously omg: E. Lockhart, We Were Liars (2014)

(my favorites bolded)

Joe Mozingo, The Fiddler on Pantico Run (Free Press, 2012)

Emily Gould, Friendship (FSG, 2014

Eowyn Ivey, The Snow Child (Reagan Arthur, 2012)

Elliott Holt, You Are One of Them (Penguin Press, 2013)

Marie Howe, What the Living Do (Norton, 1997)

Last year, Christian Wiman stepped down from his post as editor of Poetry and took a position teaching at Yale Divinity School’s Institute of Sacred Music. As a professor, his courses bead along the thin perforation between language and belief. In a recent interview with Commonweal, Wiman spoke of that intersection:

I am very tired, so today it’s just the list, with my favorites in bold.

Tim Federle, Tequila Mockingbird (2013)

Adelle Waldman, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (2013)

Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There’d Be Cake (2008; reread)

Roxane Gay, An Untamed State (2014)

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood (1987)—There is one incandescent passage in this book in which Dillard, young but not that young, is running around her neighborhood, hoping to fly, and she writes, “What could touch me now? for what were the people on Penn Avenue to me, or what was I to myself, really, but a witness to any boldness I could muster, or any cowardice if it came to that, any giving up on heaven for the sake of dignity on earth? I had not seen a great deal accomplished in the name of dignity, ever.” I love it as much as I’ve loved anything.

Tamara Faith Berger, Maidenhead (2012)—The mixed feelings I have on the plot can be summed up with a quick look at Goodreads reviews, so I won’t cover it here. I did love the frank look at adolescent sexuality and desire, something I felt was ill-covered at the time I myself was adolescent.

Mindy Kaling, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) (2011); Tina Fey, Bossypants (2011)—I reread these every time I want to feel like I’m reading but really just want to pretend to hang out with some of my favorite comedians. I am going to flip a shit when Amy Poehler’s book comes out.

Close to my final exams in Bible studies—an exam in which Alek showed a surprising interest—I adopted the verb “to know” as it is used in the Book of Genesis as part of my inner language: What, for example, did Adam know about his wife Eve? He didn’t ask, investigate, clarify things to enable him to “know about” her, and nor did she, for her part, “know about” him. Adam knew Eve his wife, and Eve, so I decided, knew Adam. And this primordial knowledge, whatever its meaning, seemed to me the highest level of relationship. A kind of pristine knowledge, preceding words and names. An illumination that does not need biographical data, and is always felt as a miracle.

And even today, years later, I’m not sure that this subliminal knowledge was a total illusion. That is to say, if I were asked my official, rational opinion, it would be that it is impossible to know someone whose language you don’t speak, whose memories you haven’t investigated, whose associations are all foreign to you. A man for whom sounds and smells, words and tastes and concepts are associated with images about which you haven’t got a clue. That’s my opinion, I have no argument to contradict it, and nevertheless, in spite of my irrefutable opinion, what is it that happens when he turns my face to him, when he looks into my face, when I look at him while we’re fucking? What else can I call it but pure knowledge? And a kind of recognition, as if we were predestined to know, and that nothing else is possible for me.

With the passing of the years, the more I thought about it, the more clearly I saw how much bullshit is involved in this kind of “knowing.” “He looked into her eyes until he saw to the depths of her soul.” “And then, in a moment of grace, his soul was revealed to her.” “They were soul mates,” and all the rest of that romantic novelette rubbish. So he fucks me with his eyes open, so I look at him without fantasizing, so I come at the same time as him without taking my eyes off him, so—what does it mean?

I say: It’s sentimental crap, I think it’s crap, it’s clear to me that it’s crap, an nevertheless, against my better judgment, I still feel it as a miracle, and I am still full of the grace of that knowledge.

I have loved the slaking of your forgetters, your indifferent hands on my loosening. Through a thousand panes of glass

not all transparent, and the temperature. I felt that. What you say is not less than that.

and couldn’t be happier. Please, don’t lose me here. I am sorry my clutch is all

tendon and no discipline: the heart is a severed kind of muscle and alone.

I can hear yours in your room. I hear mine in another room. In another’s.