Bookreview

Review Notes p35 - You might one day be offered the opportunity to display symbols of loyalty. Make sure that such symbols include your fellow citizens rather than exclude them. p37 - “We have seen that the real meaning of the greengrocer’s slogan has nothing to do with what the text of the slogan actually says. Even so, the real meaning is quite clear and generally comprehensible because the code is so familiar: the greengrocer declares his loyalty in the only way the regime is capable of hearing; that is, by accepting the prescribed ritual, by accepting appearances as reality, by accepting the given rules of the game, thus making it possible for the game to go on, for it to exist in the first place. (Snyder quoting Vaclav Havel.)” p54-55 - In fact [Churchill] himself helped the British to define themselves as a proud people who would calmly resist evil. Other politicians would have found support in British public opinion to end the war. Churchill instead resisted, inspired, and won. … Churchill did what others had not done. Rather than concede in advance, he forced Hitler to change his plans." (emphasis mine, -TB) p66 - You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case. The renunciation of reality can feel natural and pleasant, but the result is your demise as an individual—and thus the collapse of any political system that depends upon individualism. p68 - The final mode is misplaced faith. It involves the sort of self-deifying claims a president made when he said that “I alone can solve it” or “I am your retribution.” When faith descends from heaven to earth in this way, no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience. What terrified Klemperer was the way that the transition seemed permanent. Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant. At the end of the war a worker told Klemperer that “understanding is useless, you have to have faith. I believe in the Fuhrer.” Connection to my clinical deprogramming thing. p71 - [Fascists] used new media, which at the time was radio, to create a drumbeat of propaganda that aroused feelings before people had time to ascertain facts. And now, as then, many people confused faith in a hugely flawed leader with the truth about the world we all share. p79- (TB: Snyder is making an analogy between publishing/sharing falsehoods and our behavior driving cars.) We know that the damage will be mutual. We protect the other person without seeing him, dozens of time every day. (TB: reminds me a lot of Goffman’s facework theory, which was a sociological thing on how people engage with one another with a concerted effort to protect not only their face (reputation, impression) and that of those around them. Has fascinated me since I read about it in the UIC stacks in 2013.) p81 - “Make eye contact and small talk.” (Lesson 12), then p32: “You might not be sure, today or tomorrow, who feels threatened in the United States. But if you affirm everyone, you can be sure that certain people will feel better.” p84 - Protest can be organized through social media, but nothing is real that does not end on the streets. p120 - We learned to say that there was “no alternative” to the basic order of things, a sensibility that the Lithuanian political theorist Leonidas Donskis called “liquid evil.” Once inevitability was taken for granted, criticism indeed became slippery. What appeared to be critical analysis often assumed that the status quo could not actually change, and thereby indirectly reinforced it. p124 - If the politics of inevitability is like a coma, the politics of eternity is like hypnosis: We stare at the spinning vortex of cyclical myth until we fall into a trance—and then we do something shocking at someone else’s orders. TB: I have seen our current situation described as a “swinging pendulum” and I think this is a manifestation of learned helplessness. I do not believe there is a pendulum. I think there is a clash between good and evil. The pendulum, as they describe it, are bulges in the fight. If you take for granted that the fight is a pendulum and will swing back as a matter of physics, you are ceding the fight. p126: “If young people do not begin to make history, politicians of eternity and inevitability will destroy it. And to make history, young Americans will have to know some. This is not the end, but a beginning.” Review I have heard a lot about this book. Bummed that I felt an ethical panic that resulted in me leaving my apartment in the middle of the day, unprompted, a week or two ago to go to the book store and buy it. ...

Review I picked this up for a book club at work. I’m going to try to keep my review here quite short, because I have multiple things that I want to writer longer responses to / reflections upon on my Substack over probably the next few weeks. This book has caused me to reflect even more deeply and in much more specific ways about my particular role as an agent of the State in regards to housing standards, program provision, etc. These are not new thoughts, but they are honed here by sharp criticism and by realizations that this writing sparked. ...

Review Notes p8 - Anger and depression and sorrow are beautiful things in a story, but they’re like poison to the filmmaker or artist. p19 - A film should stand on its own. It’s absurd if a filmmaker needs to say what a film means in words. The world in the film is a created one, and people sometimes love going into that world. For them that world is real. And if people find out certain things about how something was done, or how this means this or that means that, the next time they see the film, these things enter into the experience. And then the film becomes different. I think it’s so precious and important to maintain that world and not say certain things that could break the experience. p21 -So you don’t know how it’s going to hit people. But if you thought about how it’s going to hit people, or if it’s going to hurt someone, or if it’s going to do this or do that, then you would have to stop making films. You just do these things that you fall in love with, and you never know what’s going to happen. p36 - There’s an expression: “Keep your eye on the doughnut, not on the hole.” If you keep your eye on the doughnut and do your work, that’s all you can control. You can’t control any of what’s out there, outside yourself. But you can get inside and do the best you can do. TB: a lot like radical acceptance. p57 - The thing about meditation is: You become more and more you. TB: Why, David, you’ve talked me right out of it! p67 - [Sound] is just another tool to ensure that you’re following that original idea and being true to it. (TB: emphasis mine.) p73 - When people are in fear, they don’t want to go to work. So many people today have that feeling. Then the fear starts turning into hate, and they begin to hate going to work. Then the hate can turn into anger and people can become angry at their boss and their work. p77-78 - TB: Story of Frank Silva and the accidental creation of BOB. Just incredible stuff. p83 - The idea is the whole thing. If you stay true to the idea, it tells you everything you need to know, really. TB: emphasis mine. Very similar to how I’ve heard other writers and makers (I think Adam Savage in particular) speak, the thing knows what it wants to be. The truth of it is what you’re trying to get to. I like that a lot. Truth is important to me. I try to make sure that what I write is true. p93 - In stories, in the worlds that we can go into, there’s suffering, confusion, darkness, tension, and anger. There are murders; there’s all kinds of stuff. But the filmmaker doesn’t have to be suffering to show suffering. You can show it, show the human condition, show conflicts and contrasts, but you don’t have to go through that yourself. You are the orchestrator of it, but you’re not in it. Let your characters do the suffering. TB: next page he goes into the van Gogh idea. Very good. p103 - I have smoked marijuana, but I no longer do. I went to art school in the 1960s, so you can imagine what was going on. (TB: lol) p121 - I don’t necessarily love rotting bodies, but there’s a texture to a rotting body that is unbelievable. Have you ever seen a little rotted animal? I love looking at those things, just as much as I like to look at a close-up of some tree bark, or a small bug, or a cup of coffee, or a piece of pie. You get in close and the textures are wonderful. TB: Okay, David. p125 - “Having a setup” – very good practical advice about having a place for which you’re ready for work all the time. p151 - Keep your own voice. Don’t do anything for the sole purpose of impressing any studio or some money people. (TB: empasis mine) p155 - How we see films is changing. The video iPod and videos online are changing everything. (TB: lol) p159 - Stay true to yourself. Let your voice ring out, and don’t let anybody fiddle with it. Never turn down a good idea, but never take a bad idea. (TB: emphasis mine.) Review Okay, where to begin. I have a lot of love for David Lynch, and reading this (which I did in about an hour, it’s quite short and spaced out), I heard his voice, which is very pleasant. I got a kick out of some of it. ...

Review Notes p38 - But I felt bad about hitting him. You know how you feel when you hit a drunk. TB: No, Hem, I can’t say I do. p62 - “God looks after rummies,” I told him and I took the thirty-eight off and stowed it down below. p98 - He was mean talking now, all right, and since he was a boy he never had no pity for nobody.. But he never had no pity for himself either. p107 - Well, I got something to think about now all right. Something to ddo and something to think about besides wondering what the hell’s going to happen. Besides wondering what’s going to happen to the whole damn thing. Once they put it up. Once you’re playing for it. Once you got a chance. Instead of just watching it all go to hell. p128 - “His goddamn face,” she thought. “Every time I see his goddamn face it makes me want to cry.” p144 - “What’s the matter with your old woman?” asked Harry cheerfully. “Why don’t you smack her?” || “You smack her,” Albert said. “I’d like to hear what she’d say. She’s some old woman to talk.” Little casual domestic violence for the vintage Hemingway fans. p174 - I guess it was nuts all right. I guess I bit off too much more than I could chew. I shouldn’t have tried it. I had it all right up to the end. Nobody’ll know how it happened. I with I could do something about Marie. … I wish I could let the old woman know what happened. I wonder what she’ll do? I don’t know. I guess I should have got a job in a filling station or something. I should have quit trying to go in boats. p176-177 - TB: there is a great little scene here where a writer observes a woman crossing the street. He has an internal monologue where he talks about how ugly she is and calls her a battleship. He starts to use her in his writing immediately and constructs a whole little tale to explain this woman that he’s seen crossing the street in tears. Hemingway does a great little smash cut at the end in the last paragraph identifying her and the reader immediately understands her tears and there is a new dimension to the mental cruelty of the writer. One of the phrases that Hem puts into this writer’s mental scribblings is, “It was good. It was, it could be easily, terrific, and it was true.” Probably Hem’s most central piece of writing advice is boiled down to, “write one true sentence.” This is how I know this little two page vignette is an artifact of self-hatred. There are a lot of artifacts of Hem’s self-hatred in this book. p185 - “I was so sentimental about you I’d break any one’s heart for you. My, I was a damned fool. I broke my own heart, too.” TB: this whole paragraph is fantastic. More: “It’s broken and gone. Everything I believed in and everything I cared about I left for you because you were so wonderful and you loved me so much that love was all that mattered. Love was the greatest thing, wasn’t it? Love was what we had that no one else had or could ever have. And you were a genius and I was your whole life. I was your partner and your little black flower. Slop. Love is just another dirty lie. Love is ergoapiol pills to make me come around because you were afraid to have a baby. Love is quinine and quinine and quinine until I’m deaf with it. Love is that dirty aborting horror that you took me to. Love is my insides all messed up. It’s half catheters and half whirling douches. I know about love. Love always hangs up behind the bathroom door. It smells like Lysol. To hell with love. Love is you making me happy and then going off to sleep with your mouth open while I lie awake all night afraid to say my prayers even because I know I have no right to any more. Love is all the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book. All right. I’m through with you and I’m through with love. Your kind of picknosed love. You writer.” (TB: emphasis mine. Another artifact of Hem’s self-hatred. It’s no mistake he puts these words in the mouth of the writer’s wife.) p191 - “Well, it’s all over, so why be bitter?” (TB: really great emotional stuff from a Hemingway male character… Fuck this guy.) p195 - The whiskey warmed his tongue and the back of his throat, but did not change his ideas any, and suddenly, looking at himself in the mirror behind the bar, he knew that drinking was never going to do any good to him now. Whatever he had now he had, and it was from now on, and if he drank himself unconscious when he woke up it would be there. p202 - TB: there’s an exchange with some vets in this area, I guess 201-203 and maybe a little past that. I feel like there is more than what’s on the page. I expect I will re-read this someday. But here are parts that stand out to me: “Let us in,” the bloody-faced one said. “Let in me and my old buddy.” He whispered into Richard Gordon’s ear, “I don’t have to hand it out. I can take it, see?” … “I can take it” … “It’s a secret.” “Sometimes it feels good,” he said. “How do you feel about that?” “First it was an art,” he said. “Then it became a pleasure. If things made me sick you’d make me sick, Red.” TB: Clearly they’re talking about pain, the context is basically taking punches. But it’s got to be a lot more than that. I think it’s Hem talking about being able to take emotional pain. That “Sometimes it feels good” seems to me like something a ruminator says. I’m a ruminator. Sometimes you imagine terribly dark things and you imagine people you love being very cruel or saying things they would never say. It doesn’t feel good. But I understand exactly what he’s saying. It feels terrible, but there’s something to it. Like smashing in your tear ducts. There’s something to it. p206 Related to previous note - “Because we are the desperate ones,” the man said. “The ones with nothing to lose. We are the completely brutalized ones. We’re worse than the stuff the original Spartacus worked with. But it’s tough to try and do anything with because we have been beaten so far that the only solace is booze and the only pride is in being able to take it. But we’re not all like that. There are some of us that are going to hand it out.” (TB: emphasis mine.) p212 - As Richard Gordon watched him he felt a sick feeling in his chest. And he knew for the first time how a man feels when he looks at the man his wife is leaving him for. p221 - What he was thinking as he watched him was not pleasant. It is a moral sin, he thought, a grave and deadly sin and a great cruelty, and while technically one’s religion may permit the ultimate result, I cannot pardon myself. On the other hand, a surgeon cannot desist while operating for fear of hurting the patient. But why must all the operations in life be performed without an anaesthetic? If I had been a better man I would have let him beat me up. It would have been better for him. (TB: emphasis mine.) p225 - “A man,” Harry Morgan said, looking at them both. “One man alone ain’t got. No man alone now.” He stopped. “No matter how a man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance.” He shut his eyes. It had taken him a long time to get it out and it had taken him all his life to learn it. p229 - TB: line here about a side-character being impotent. Interesting. Hem seems to have a lot of impotent or rumored-impotent characters (do I only think this because I just re-read Sun Also Rises? Maybe). It’s relatively interesting given all his affairs and all his characters’ affairs and the extreme heartbreak in so many of his works. p230 - “Didn’t you ever notice any difference in nights?” (TB: character talking about how during the day it’s hard enough but at night it’s another matter. Two characters in this book have this thought and it’s the same thought that Jake in Sun Also Rises returns to. Things are harder at night. A lot harder.) Chapter 24, from page 227 to 247, has vignettes of other characters throughout the yachtyard. Just incredible. I loved all of them. p238 - Some made the long drop from the apartment or the office window; some took it quietly in two-car garages with the motor running; some used the native tradition of the Colt or Smith and Wesson; those well-constructed implements that end insomnia, terminate remorse, cure cancer, avoid bankruptcy, and blast an exit from intolerable positions by the pressure of a finger; those admirable American instruments so easily carried, so sure of effect, so well designed to end the American dream when it becomes a nightmare, their only drawback the mess they leave for relatives to clean up. (TB: emphasis mine.) p260 - I don’t know what to do. It ain’t like when he was away on trips. Then he was always coming back but now I got to go on the rest of my life. And I’m big now and ugly and old and he ain’t here to tell me that I ain’t. I’d have to hire a man to do it now I guess and then I wouldn’t want him. So that’s the way it goes. That’s the way it goes alright. … I wonder if he thought about me or what he thought about. … Nothing is any good to wish. … Nobody’s going to tell me that and there ain’t nothing now but to take it every day the way it comes and just get started doing something right away. But Jesus Christ, what do you do at nights is what I want to know. … You just go dead inside and everything is easy. TB: emphasis mine. These are from Harry’s wife from pages 260 to 261 across several paragraphs of thought. Review Lots of spoilers in here. ...

Review Notes p2 - What Lee looked for in any relationship was the feel of contact. p7-8 - Actually, Moor’s brush-off was calculated to inflict the maximum hurt possible under the circumstances. It put Lee in the position of a detestably insistent queer, too stupid and insensitive to realize that his attentions were not wanted, forcing Moor to the distasteful necessity of drawing a diagram. p15 - The result was ghastly. || As Lee stood aside to bow in his dignified old-world greeting, there emerged instead a leer of naked lust, wretched in the pain and hate of his deprived body and, in simultaneous double exposure, a sweet child’s smile of liking and trust, shockingly out of time and place, mutilated and hopeless. p23 - Lee watched the thin hands, the beautiful violet eyes, the flush of excitement on the boy’s face. An imaginary hand projected with such force it seemed Allerton must feel the touch of ectoplasmtic fingers caressing his ear, phantom thumbs smoothing his eyebrows, pushing the hair back from his face. Now Lee’s hands were running down over the ribs, the stomach. Lee felt the aching pain of desire in his lungs. His mouth was a little open, showing his teeth in the half snarl of a baffled animal. He licked his lips. p24-25 - [Allerton] was forced to ask himself: “What does he want from me?” It did not occur to him that Lee was queer, as he associated queerness with at least some degree of overt effeminacy. Allerton was intelligent and surprisingly perceptive for a person so self-centered, but his experience was limited. He decided finally that Lee valued him as an audience. p32-33 - In the dark theater Lee could feel his body pull toward Allerton, an amoeboid protoplasmic projection, straining with a blind worm hunger to enter the other’s body, to breathe with his lungs, see with his eyes, learn the feel of his viscera and genitals. Allerton shifted in his seat. Lee felt a sharp twinge, a strain or dislocation of the spirit. His eyes ached. He took off his glasses and ran his hand over his closed eyes. p45 - (Baked Alaska and Lee’s dish idea.) p50- “How about dinner tonight?” asked Lee. Allerton said, “No, I think I’ll work tonight.” Lee was depressed and shattered. The warmth and laughter of Saturday night was lost, and he did not know why. In any relation of love or friendship, Lee attempted to establish contact on the non-verbal level of intuition, a silent exchange of thought and feeling. Now Allerton had abruptly shut off contact, and Lee felt a physical pain, as though a part of himself tentatively stretched out towards the other had been severed, and he was looking at the bleeding stump in shock and disbelief. p50 - (TB: around this area, Lee begins to really press on Allerton. He starts offering him money to spend time with him, but it’s not phrased like that. He says things like, “I subsidize non-production. I will pay you twenty pesos not to work tonight.” He is surprised and hurt when Allerton rejects this. It doesn’t stop him from repeating it a few times later.) p51 - He got up and walked out. He walked slowlly. Several times he leaned on a tree, looking at the ground as if his stomach hurt. Inside his apartment he took off his coat and shoes, sat down on the bed. His throat began to ache, moisture hit his eyes, and he fell across the bed, sobbing convulsively. He pulled his knees up and covered his face with hands, the fists clenched. Towards morning he turned on his back and stretched out. The sobs stopped, and his face relaxed in the morning light. p52-53 - He forced himself to look at the facts. Allerton was not queer enough to make a reciprocal relation possible. Lee’s affection irritated him. … [Lee] had no close friends. He disliked definite appointments. He did not like to feel that anybody expected anything from him.. He wanted, so far as possible, to live without external pressure. Allerton resented Lee’s action in paying to recover the camera. … “I liked him and I wanted him to like me,” Lee thought. “I wasn’t trying to buy anything.” || “I have to leave town,” he decided. “Go somewhere. Panama, South America.” … A feeling of cold desolation came over him at the thought of arriving in another country, far away from Allerton. p56-60 – (TB: an extended “routine” from Lee, initially to Allerton and his chess partner and implied lover, Mary, and concluded after they have left. Lee is telling stories and it isn’t clear to me if he is sharing memories of real things or just making things up. It is basically irrelevant as the ‘routine’ on Corn Hole Gus’s Used Slave Lot - a fantasy(?) of Lee taking a slave boy and seeking to trade him in for a pure Beduin. These are children, by the way. In the appendix/original introduction by Burroughs, he describes these as flights of fancy, routines, Lee settling into his writing. Okay.) p65 - (TB: Lee is so pining for any attention from Allerton that he contemplates buying a stake in the bar where Allerton keeps a tab, so that the man could not ignore him. Awful.) p72 - (TB: At a point in the story where Lee and Allerton are more or less traveling outside of Mexico by themselves, Lee sets up a contract where Allerton will sleep with him twice a week. This feels abhorrent and unreal. Why would Lee want this if he loves Allerton? Doesn’t he want there to be some warmth? At no point does Allerton ever express anything but disgust for Lee. Anyway, on page 72 Lee shows him where to buy sex from women where they’re at, and encourages him. I really don’t understand Lee at all. Isn’t he haunted by that thought? It’s so bizarre.) p79 - [Lee] had an arm around Gene’s shoulders. They were both wearing swimming strunks. The sea was glassy. He saw a fish rise in a swirl of water. He lay down with his head in Allerton’s lap. He felt peaceful and happy. He had never felt that way in his life, except maybe as a young child. He couldn’t remember. The bitter shocks of his childhood had blacked out memory of happy times. p80 - “While we are in Ecuador we must score for Yage,” Lee said. “Think of it: thought control. Take anyone apart and rebuild to your taste. Anything about somebody bugs you, you say, ‘Yage! I want that routine took clear out of his mind.’ I could think of a few changes I might make in you, doll.” He looked at Allerton and licked his lips. “You’d be so much nicer after a few alterations. You’re nice now, of course, but you do have those irritating little peculiarities. I mean, you won’t do exactly what I want you to do all the time.” (TB: Holy shit, can you imagine someone saying this to you? This is insane! How can you think that way about someone?) p113 - I have dreamed many times I was back in Mexico City, talking to Art or Allerton’s best friend, Johnny White, and asking where he was. Dream about Allerton continually. Usually we are on good terms, but sometimes he is inexplicably hostile, and when I ask why, what is the matter, his answer is muffled. I never find out why. (TB: this is from the last chapter, 2 years after the events of the book, and notably the writing has changed from third-person to first-person. Anyway, I recognize these dreams. Have had them. But for Lee to think that hostility from Allerton could be inexplicable demonstrates no insight.) Appendix, Burroughs’s original introduction: p131: “I glance at the manuscript of Queer and feel I simply can’t read it. My past was a poisoned river from which one was fortunate to escape, and by whicih one feels immediately threatened, years after the events recorded—painful to an extent I find it difficult to read, let alone to write about. Every word and gesture sets the teeth on edge.” p135 - I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out. Review I picked this up recently because I wanted to read this before watching Luca’s adaptation with Daniel Craig. Also because I have been reading a lot of McCarthy and Hemingway over the past year or so but am desperately sick of reading straight relationships and reading Love, Leda made me yearn to read more gay writing. ...

Review Notes Author: Galway Kinnell Last read: 2025-01-26 Rating: 1 Form: Poetry Genre: Literary Fiction Times read: 1 Copies owned: 0 Fun score: N/A

Review Notes p11 - “Listen, Robert, going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.” p26 - “Don’t you love me?” “Love you? I simply turn all to jelly when you touch me.” “Isn’t there anything we can do about it?” … “And there’s not a damn thing we could do,” I said. “I don’t know,” she said, “I don’t want to go through that hell again.” p27 - “It’s funny. And it’s a lot of fun, too, to be in love.” “Do you think so?” her eyes looked flat again. “I don’t mean fun that way. In a way it’s an enjoyable feeling.” “No,” she said. “I think it’s hell on earth.” “It’s good to see each other.” “No. I don’t think it is.” “Don’t you want to?” “I have to.” p31 - My head started to work. The old grievance. p31 - Probably I never would have had any trouble if I hadn’t run into Brett when they shipped me to England. I suppose she only wanted what she couldn’t have. Well, people were that way. To hell with people. The Catholic Church had an awfully good way of handling all that. Good advice, anyway.. Not to think about it. Oh, it was swell advice. Try and take it sometime. Try and take it. p34 - This was Brett, that I felt like crying about.. Then I thought of her walking up the street and stepping into the car, as I had last seen her, and of course in a little while I felt like hell again. It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing. p99 - Why I felt the impulse to devil him I do not know. Of course I do know. I was blind, unforgivingly jealous of what had happened to him. The fact that I took it as a matter of course did not alter that any. I certainly did hate him. p136 - “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.” p148 - I could shut my eyes without getting the wheeling sensation. But I could not sleep. There is no reason why because it is dark you should look at things differently from when it is light. The hell there isn’t! p183 - “Do you still love me, Jake?” “Yes,” I said. “Because I’m a goner,” Brett said. “How?” “I’m a goner. I’m mad about the Romero boy. I’m in love with him, I think.” … “Oh, darling, please stay by me. Please stay by me and see me through this.” p197 - “Badly cogido,” he said. “All for sport. All for pleasure.” p239 - That seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back.. And sign the wire with love. That was all right. p245 - [Jake] “I thought you weren’t going to talk about it.” “How can I help it?” “You’ll lose it if you talk about it.” Review I picked this book off my shelf a few months ago knowing that I was on a high-speed collision course with a re-read. I am not sure where I got this copy. It is dated on the inside cover in handwriting 1966. It is blue clothbound and cotton paged, and the pages feel very nice. ...

Review Notes p189 - “I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.” ...

Review Review Thanks to my friend Erin for loaning me this book! Standard disclaimer about poetry: I don’t know anything about it and am rating based on my response. I liked these! Not as much as I did The Sun & Her Flowers, but still. I thought the poems dealing with themes of trust, belief, self-compassion, and acceptance were my favorites (list of page numbers at end). There are several that speak to Kaur’s experience as an immigrant, particularly as a child. While I don’t relate to the immigrant experience, a lot of them felt familial to growing up very poor. I related to those aspects, both the experiences of them and the sensitivies and anxieties the experiences leave you with. Several I really did not quite get / they did not speak to me at all. That’s okay. I bumped on a few. That’s okay too! ...

Review Table of Poems Title Page Flag Poem. (cornflakes) 31 Favorite Daggers. 74 Favorite Poem. (rip) 86 Favorite “Let him go in mind” 91 Favorite True Homosexual Love. 105 Favorite Dear Friend Go Away, Please. 106 Favorite There You Go Baby. 148 Favorite He is a Rose. 155 Favorite New brave wired ones. 24 Poem Queers 35 Poem How Odd. 43 Poem “soon the mind will be heavy” 62 Poem I Tell You Now. 65 Poem From Hospital. 67 Poem Bootless. 70 Poem “Two queers live on a hill” 80 Favorite “oral pictures of love” 93 Poem Nerves Blotted Out. 108 Poem “I love my arse to be sucked” 112 Poem “desert bones” 114 Poem All Sunday Long. 122 Poem Radio-Me: The Big Send Up of Everything Around Us. 130 Poem “The world is at war” 139 Poem To my mother, dead. 141 Poem Looking for a Poem. 20 Stanza Between You and Humanity. 21 Stanza “I can’t sell my penis because” 41 Stanza This Poem. 54 Stanza Answer don’t move. 119 Stanza Reatity. 127 Stanza I am frozen with knowledge. 148 Stanza Review I picked this up from the bookstore after loving Love Leda so much. I have been trying to read a little more poetry. Like my recent review for Rupi Kaur’s The Sun & Her Flowers, I have no idea how to review poetry. I don’t know what good poetry looks like or what bad poetry looks like. All I know is that sometimes words are strung together and they give me an emotional reaction. So that’s what I’m rating this collection on. ...