One of the hardest things to do when presses ask for a summary of a poetry collection is to give them a good summary of the poetry collection. I used to think that was me, but following editors and agents on Instagram, I am relieved to find that others struggle with this task. Tangentially, I find the introductions to poetry collections to be one of the most useless things to read when I pick up a book of poems, as I don’t go to a poem to have someone else interpret it for me and tell me what is great about this or that writer. I may go back to the front to see, though, if maybe I am missing (so not completely useless) to see if the esteemed poet or editor summarizing their selection has any keys to unlock the aesthetic that I may be missing. Otherwise, I find that re-reading a poem I “get” and then re-reading a set of poems in the batch—that is how I come to “understand” in a non-compartmentalized way, the work.
Honestly, some of the most successful poetry books of the last decade have been ruined for me before reading them by press and by the blurb, by the praise of the person who chose them.
One of my favorite poets is Claudia Rankine. I never had to read an introduction to her work. I just needed to get my 23-year-old hands on Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric, and read it. I grew up in the 80s and 90s. I grew up around black families, I grew up in white America. I heard the world speak of black and Hispanic people in diminutive terms. My friends being cursed. My mom’s boyfriends/fiance, my aunt’s husband, all being reduced to their black and brown skin. I grew up raised by TV, my mom at work or out with men, at bars, or at home, depressed on the couch. So…Rankine’s work did not need to be prefaced for me.
Where am I going with this post? Who really cares? The problem I have with summaries and (yes, I’m an English professor) overly structured analysis of texts, of people, is what we repeatedly remind ourselves about defining things too much: now I am telling you what to see, and now I am limiting what I think I’ve done, or what you may see in what I’ve done.
So when presses ask for summaries, it’s like when colleges ask for a teaching philosophy or a cover letter. It’s so damn hard to reduce down what one "does" or how one “exists” on the page or in a classroom. Yes, it has to be done, but it is hard.
Dear Irreverence, is a manuscript of poems that started after my first book, scatteredly, but then really came into focus during Covid. That personal history I touched on above, plus my history of anxiety and depression, plus a Celiac diagnosis, plus watching in isolation as America repeated itself with racial tension and a denial of its past. Thinking to myself, how do I want my sons to be in this America, in an America that will look like this when they, too, are my age? The book is a poem a epistles, even those not in the form of letters, but the book is my letter to a time in which my family was lonely and heartbroken, for Covid isolation and fear, but also for the America that we witness.
It is both a lovesong and a big middle-finger to the way we isolate each other for our own delight, our own specialness. It is a recognition that we are all wasting our time dividing ourselves in the shortness of our gifted lives. It is a call to revere the world and to say, fuck being an asshole. Or, if I wanted to soften the edges…
It’s a poetry collection in which I look back at my own childhood and parallel it to what witnessing my sons’ childhood. It’s a book about wrestling with mental health, but that’s kind of silly to say, because that’s just part of the life of the speaker.
But it is not silly, because in revision year after year, the poems begin to look at an estrangement that extends beyond America. The past year or so, while working on a second manuscript (Palatable Dust) poems I tried to avoid writing or including, became necessary: poems about my long estrangement with my mother and brother. Poems that I wish I never felt compelled to write, but did. And why? Because like a cover letter, those poems will never be enough to tackle the complication of history. They don’t say I love you even though I love both my mother and my brother dearly. But I have spent my life exploring the silence and the sadness that inhibits it. The things that fracture our relationships—the personal and the public/social.
And yes, I get that no book ever really fully realizes the world, which is why we all write, and we all read on. As I’ve gotten older, and as I teach my sons, I love America, but like many who critique it, I find so much work needs to be done for America to exist for everyone the way it should.