Raises fascinating questions about the complex difficulty (impossibility?) of finding meaning and purpose in existence.

Stories run the gamut from haiku-esque length to longer short story length. There are slow moments, but there are poignant moments of clarity too—

“Before I went to bed I told myself things were getting better. It was true: this day had been better than the day before, and the day before had been better than most of last week, though not much better.”

The poems generally start out with a typical ha-ha joke - then go on to give said jokes somewhat weepy back stories intended to reveal some sort of truth about the human experience. For the most part, the back stories just made the jokes - not funny—

It’s sort of in the Billy Collins mode of writing, which is understandable since he’s the one who chose this book as the Winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry.

A tad repetitive with too many recapsulations and summaries, but overall a wonderfully informative and engaging - and ultimately positive - book.

Trash would be quite the depressing book, except it’s so often surprising and whimsical. Where else do you get to see scenes fro Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove recreated from teensy bits of trash?

Edited by John Knechtel, Trash collects together a wide range of art and writing: Pretty pinkish photos of dust bunnies, an eerie fictional story set in a zero-waste town - even a photo essay examining the body as trash, pointing to the hundreds of young girls been murdered - and officially forgotten—in Juarez, Mexico.

The rest of my review’s here.

Poems—many of them love poems of sorts to his wife Caryl, but also poems that explore socio-political issues without hammering you over the head with rhetoric. In his intro, he writes: “The task increasingly becomes to remain open to the voices that appear in the contradictions of trying to lead a decent life while being a whilte American male, and even if poor by current American standards, living with the conveniences that only 1 percent of the world population enjoys.”

The story of a man who returns from war horribly disfigured, who finds a couple helpers to read to him and deliver strange letters to a woman he’s obsessed with. The painful and magical plot revolves around the relationships and friendships between these four—

Main difference from the movie: The characters are not as good looking. Also, a few extra flashbacks, more nuanced details.

Paul Valery’s Monsieur Teste is a book cut-up—a book composed of fragments, or maybe more accurately, a book as evidence of the fragmentary nature of experience.

In fact while Valery published a slim volume titled Monsieur Teste in 1896, Valery kept scribbling about this Teste figure in his notebooks, using him as a sort of philosophical alter-ego throughout his life: “The systematic use of Me as He.” Or, “I confess that I have made an idol of my mind, but I have found no other.”

The Princeton UP edition I read begins with the original publication, followed notes and fragments the translator collected together.

and I added, repeating what all rather simple-minded people think: “So, what am I doing here?”
“Well…,” said Monsieur Teste, “you are wondering what you are doing here….”

Juxtaposing a girl’s coming-of-age story with biblical allusions and dreamlike new myths, Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit tells the semi-autobiographical story of a gal raised by Pentecostal evangelists who slowly discovers her own beliefs and lesbian desires—and gets kicked out of her church and home pretty fast.

Odd thing is, in the end, Jeanette comes back to town to visit her religion-crazed mother. Oranges is in large part a story of family, forgiveness, and redemption—these terms defined very differently, of course, from Jeanette’s original upbringing.