I get that I’m not “getting it”: December book reviews

These are the books I read in the month of December, 2022—

Hallelujah, Giant Space Wolf by Daniel Bailey

This one took me a while to get through because I’d have to stop after nearly every poem to take a picture of the ~2 pages I’d just read and send them to someone. This one’s more sprawling than Drunk Sonnets, though not as sprawling as A Better Word for the World, which is not a qualitative statement. Daniel Bailey is excellent in either mode. Need to figure out how to be more like Daniel Bailey.

The End of Vandalism by Tom Drury

Hot dang. Just delightful. I marveled at how far outside my wheelhouse this novel is, how hard it must’ve been to write. A full small town of colorful characters. I oddly Stranger Thingsed them in my head, which was weird. The main character is a cop so I just pictured that warmly gruff handsome dude who also makes me think of Nick Offerman. And so the new wife looked like… oh gosh, what’s her name. Not Parker Posey. Not Helena Bonham Carter. Wynona Ryder? Rider? Ryder. The one who got in trouble for stealing stuff? Or doing drugs. Stealing stuff on drugs. Stealing drugs. I only watched one season of Stranger Things. I’d watch ~8 seasons of a TV show based on this book, or however many seasons there are of Stranger Things now. Oddly, I think it could actually be done. I wonder what the status is on this book’s IP. Somebody ring up Netflix. Thank you, Joshua, for sending this to me. I really liked it. (Just looked it up. Winona. Dangit.)

Characters by Derek Maine

I’ve really liked many of Derek’s pieces online. I’ve always compulsively winced whenever I see Derek doing Derek things on the timeline. I was ready to accept that I wasn’t going to get to this one given that life is short, time is precious, etc., but then I changed my mind. Not about life and time, but about getting to this one. I don’t regret it, but I also don’t think it was entirely successful. I think it failed in a compelling way. I admire Derek’s ambitiousness with the scope of this book and the way it’s woven together. It falls short for me in seemingly patting itself on the back for being clever or confessional or confrontational or risky, when it wasn’t really very much of any of those things. If you lose a friend for writing a thinly veiled story, by all means process that on the page. Fabricate around the edges for the sake of a narrative. Divulge some nasty secrets and make some up too so people can’t guess what’s real. That’s all great. Hmm. I keep going back and forth feeling like I’m being too negative or too positive, and I’m gradually talking myself into liking the book more. The individual pieces are good. They fit together pretty well. It needed some room to breathe or something.

Letters to Emma Bowlcut by Bill Callahan

Posted a pic of the cover to my IG story and got way more engagement than normal. A frequent contributor to NOON said “One of my all time favorites,” which made sense. The host of a literary podcast that I enjoy but don’t listen to very often said “Never seen one in the wild,” then “Is it good or is it wack,” then “I love Bill but I can see it going either way lol.” I responded “I really like it so far! It’s hard not to read in his voice, and is kinda charmingly overwrought like his lyrics, but the unselfconscious melodrama fits the epistolariness perfectly,” to which the pod host heart-reacted. Half of my favorite indie lit power couple asked “Wow, how is it?” I said roughly the same thing that I said to the pod host. I may have even copy+pasted part of my answer. I’m embarrassed by that. Another friend said “Cool.”

Literally Show Me a Healthy Person by Darcie Wilder

I guess I just really like reading tweets. Especially good tweets. I like how someone’s recurring preoccupations reveal themselves when you get a nice corpus like this to digest in one go. It’s a great document/snapshot of a life. More of you should tweet like this.

Considering how exaggerated music is by Leslie Scalapino

So many of my friends favor brevity and clarity, so it’s nice to be reminded that convolution has its joys. Sometimes I forget who I really am and have been. When I posted this cover to my IG story, someone who has tattooed me a few times responded admiringly about the cover. I replied with the image credit, which is “Twin Suns” from Makrokosmos II by George Crumb. Curious about the piece, I found that it accompanied (and maybe even depicts the actual musical notation of?) a piano composition. I looked it up on Spotify and listened to ~30s before turning it off.

Plans for Sentences by Renee Gladman

I get that I’m not fully “getting it,” but I’m enjoying not getting it. It’s horizon-expanding to mix up ideas of writing and mark-making and mapping and space on the page with different concepts of scale and interior logic for overloaded terms as if familiar English words don’t mean what I am sure they actually mean.

Funeral by Daisuke Shen and Vi Khi Nao

Building off some assumptions based on formatting decisions about who wrote which portion of this text, I really enjoyed this absurd volley of legend, celebrity, food, and something even more geometrically elaborate than just a love triangle. Interdimensional love fractals?? One section appears to have been the framework—just the headers—for what could have easily been 24+ more pages of heart-rooted antics that I would’ve happily read, but I also enjoy what happens to the flow of time and consequence in the omission. It felt like a canny and clever decision that may have just been “feeling done with this.” Vi and Daisuke are very exciting writers.

Accept / Reject by Erin Dorney

Nice, spare, well-spaced, and meditative. Not too bleak or effortfully profound. Solid erasure work, engaging on several levels. Cheerful book object. A pleasure to own. Also, an easy way to get in a hundredth book on the last day of the year.