My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge: Poems

by Paul Guest

My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge is a fierce and original collection—its generosity of voice and emotional range announce the arrival of a major new poet. At the age of twelve, Paul Guest suffered a bicycle accident that left him paralyzed for life. But out of sudden disaster evolved a fierce poetic sensibility—one that blossomed into a refuge for all the grief, fury, and wonder at life forever altered. Although its legacy lies in tragedy, the voice of these brilliant poems cuts a broad swath of whether he is lamenting the potentiality of physical experience or imagining the electric temptations of sexuality, Guest offers us a worldview that is unshakable in its humanity.

Genres: Poetry, Disability

96 pages, Paperback

First published October 29, 2008

About the author

Paul Guest's first book, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World, won the 2002 New Issues Prize in Poetry, and his second book, Notes for My Body Double, won the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. In 2010 Ecco will publish his memoir, One More Theory About Happiness. The recipient of a 2007 Whiting Award, he is a visiting professor of English at the University of West Georgia.

Reviews

[Jon Nakapalau · Rating 5 out of 5]

A powerful poetic eye that switches between microscope and telescope to see the everyday in vivid and challenging context. This is a great 'perspective' book that helps you to see things from a point of view that you might not have been use to seeing in the past. Much to think on here - which is what I look for in a book!

[Edita · Rating 3 out of 5]

when asked
to name what I couldn’t live without
were I marooned on a desert island,
I say viable organs. Not a book and its pages
slipping from cheap binding
and not an album
that’s not an album
but summer’s totem forever
and not one deft lover
and not the red ringlets
of her hair let down in a grotto beside the sea.
To be consigned there,
to that island, that home
to the fetish of consolation,
is nothing I ever want
to want. To be stripped of desire
as if it were a bandage.
But here in the night made of alarms,
a train shambles
through the dark
and it’s hard to hear the trees speaking
the language we made
for them. Or I did,
thinking of you
who taught me regret.
There are nights when I dream
of stolen oranges.
How we ran away with the sun in our arms.
And there are nights
when I can’t speak,
not even to the wind
in the strange tongue of the dark pine trees.

[Cindy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of 48 poems by a unique individual. Dark, intriguing and amusing, this poetry about his slightly horrifying situation will at least stir your emotions.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Normally I'm not that into poetry, but Paul's poems--all of them infused with emotions rooted in the accident that left him paralyzed at age 12--are incredible.

[Rich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lyrical, sarcastic, surreal.

[Abraham · Rating 4 out of 5]

In many ways this is a fantastic piece of work. The author has been paralyzed from the neck down for many years and is still quite pissed off about it. In the first half of the collection he hides his anger with irony and a kind of discursiveness, so popular in poetry today. After a while, however, he seems to no longer be able to avoid the issue, and trips off into fantasies of if-I-still-had-a-functioning-body and the like. He dreams about affairs and slowly grows pissed off about people's attitudes toward him. All the while his pacing remains brilliant and his turns of phrase endlessly unique (though sometimes at the borders of nonsense). By the end the self-pity is a little overwhelming, and you realize this is not a man you would want to hang out with, but it is one whose next book will be read cover to cover as well.

[Christina · Rating 5 out of 5]

This man is pure genius.

[C. Varn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absurdity and rage--Guest's poems deal with coming to terms with the anger and absurdity of disability. He seems able to laugh and spit fire about his paralysis at once. He can focus on the tiny detail and seemingly approach problems from the height of nearly infinite space. This collection is linked and very much rewards re-reads.

[Jeremy Johnston · Rating 2 out of 5]

Swings between too cute and too “I love dictionaries”. Every once in a while, Guest hits a sweet spot, like describing breakfast in an airport or perusing the fridge during a snowstorm. Otherwise, his impulse is to push the ordinary into the extravagant, making lines that are neither.

[Bill Fletcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to admit, I'm not the world's most patient reader of poetry. I get bored kind of quickly if the poems are too esoteric and I have a hard time with sing-song rhyming schemes. My favorites are Dryden and Pope, with a little Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath thrown in. I've tried to expand my range but attempts often end in half-finished books and a feeling of failure. All of which is to say that I was really amazed when I started flipping through this book at a poetry bookstore (Open Books in Seattle). The opening lines of each poem not only set the tone but somehow capture you right away -- like this one from "Oblivion: Letter Home 2":

Thanks for the cucumber lotion and coupons
you cut out of the Sunday paper
though I had to bury them in an old thermos
or sink them with bricks and twine
so nobody killed me. Reading the obituary
for Mr. Kondrackie was sad
though he once beat me with his cane
for guessing wrong. We all have our faults,
I think....

I'm not clever enough with poetry to explain why that grips me so hard, but pretty much every poem in the volume does it to me. Guest has been paraplegic since age 12 and writes with a stick in his mouth. Many of the poems convey the anger, frustration and sexual longing that you might expect from someone whose physical abilities are so much more limited than his emotional and intellectual ones. He published a memoir in 2010 (_One More Theory About Happiness_); I can't wait to read it!

[Kasandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

I chose this based on the title alone, and it didn't disappoint: there is more than slightly horrifying knowledge here, and surprises around every corner. These poems are funny, angry, contemporary in a way I don't always like - but liked very much in this volume. I didn't always understand them, but that didn't prevent enjoyment, and their fast pace (for the most part) fit the angry, romantic, original, often cruel and sarcastic, intelligent, and poignant voice of Guest, whose other work I must find and read as well. This work is full of thoughtful, clever and unexpected imagery and ideas, and even the poems you start that feel potentially familiar often come to be strange by the end, in a good way: these wake you up, dare you to say they're not true. This is a smorgasbord of varieties of suffering as well as enjoyment - basically, life in a book, illuminated and refreshed. Exhilarating and definitely not like anyone else you've read.

[Cate · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is incredible. I had no idea, and it's been sitting on the floor next to my bed for months. Really nice, sturdy hardcover. I picked it up last night before bed and had to keep reading the poems. I'm probably the last one on the band waggon here, like I was when I really liked that Gnarls Barkley song, Crazy, and it had already been overplayed for 6 months, and I had somehow missed that. Doesn't make it any less enjoyable, even if I am a little slow on the up-take. I highly, highly recommended to poem people and people who poo poo. Put your poo away.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

These poems are full of humor and snideness, yet the tone is generally one of subtle awe. I'm curious about some lines/images, which seem as though they could find a suitable place in several poems, so that I'm not convinced that they belong solely to the poem they're in. Guest builds a great connection in the volume--for example, there are several elegies, a "Guest-eque" form re-appears in several different poems, some poems share the same title, such as "Oblivion: Letter Home 1" (and 2 and 3), etc. The poet does not dwell on his condition, but he does not ignore it.

[Koeeoaddi · Rating 4 out of 5]

From User's Guide To Physical Debilitation

...It is our hope that this guide
will be a valuable resource
during this long stretch of boredom and dread
and that it may be of some help,
however small, to cope with your new life
and the gradual, bittersweet loss
of every God damned thing you ever loved.

-- Paul Guest

Link to full poem.

Thanks for that, Mr. Guest. Brilliant poems, but you're killing me.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorite poems in this book: "Loyalty Oath," "My Past" ("There are things I know of so little worth I resent them their place in this pot of meat my head is."), "Remember How Sad That Was Then," "Regarding Your Applications for Many Imaginary Positions," "Job," and "Travel."

[Saara Raappana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Awesome post-confessionalism.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

So amazing

[Angela · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't exactly know how to review this book fairly. Guest became a quadriplegic at age twelve and many of his poems are bitter rants about how his condition has ruined most aspects of his life. There is so much writing that grapples with identity, but I can't say that I've read anything from the perspective of the disabled until now. In my opinion, the media loves to put a feel-good spin on people with disabilities, so Guest's perspective was refreshingly honest in its negativity. However—and I know this is going to sound judgmental and privileged—I grew tired of the angsty tone of his poems. I also didn't care for his style in general, which digresses often and tends to ramble on for an entire page without pause. Aside from his medical condition, Guest writes about the detritus of everyday life: junk mail, infomercials, Chinese takeout, hearing neighbours having bad sex, bad winter weather.

I think I could enjoy his poetry in small doses. He has a scathing sense of humour:

And I will love your tasteless waffles and not loudly announce your free coffee tastes like ass. I won't do that. Not again. I made promises. I'll wait patiently like a Hummel figurine. I will cherish my skin of dust while you send my luggage to Cincinnati and me to hell. Which is the Airport Marriot. I will covet the complimentary toiletries. I will cover my broken body in your free Colgate. I will be white, white, white. Except for the bruises.

(from "Travel," p.57)

or

I'm beginning to dream again of my life among
the ornamental, the vaguely functional,
the doorstops and paperweights, my tenure
in the legion of lawn gnomes, my brotherhood
with novelty decanters, my solidarity
with the generally useless, the inscrutably devised,
the deformed idea, the Elvis clock,
the flea market phantasm, the broken
stapler clicking toothlessly, the pen caddy unpenned

(from "My Life Among," p.3)

Poems that I liked:
"The Lives of the Optimists."

=1/48 (2.1%) poems that I liked.

[Garrett Roney · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Which is to say I don't / recall a thing that I dreamed last night, / the color of anything, the tenebrous custard of clouds, / the water that fell in shapes / from the elm trees. Really, what I'm thinking / tonight is there is nothing / in all the flat world which would satisfy me. Not food and not love and no / Epicurean kink involving both / and in this I am trying to feel only / a little sad. Slightly broken. / Returnable, still, even to the ones I loved, / their darling, imperious airs, / their hair in careless garlands / announcing one more morning or one last.”

[Michele Benson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Regarding Your Applications For Many Imaginary Positions was my favorite poem in this collection. This book was darker and sadder than Notes For My Body Double, but Applications made me laugh out loud.

[xander ツ · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars. as a disabled person i had high hopes for this. unfortunately i couldn’t get past the way Guest referred to women and his relationships with women. read very patriarchal/borderline misogynistic to me.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the poem "A Long Time I've Wanted to Say Something".

[Del Rosario · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't like this book until the poem Oblivion: Letter Home I. Up until that point, I found the lack of breaks in those single long stanzas and the torrent of descriptions too overwhelming. But after that poem, I grew to appreciate that quality because life is overwhelming. This book of poems is best read at night, preferably in the early morning, like around three. It feels right to read this book then for some reason. Probably because everything is finally quiet, and the jumble of descriptions don't clash with other sounds. My favorite poem was Airport Letter 2. Something about that acceptance of sadness really spoke to me.

[C · Rating 3 out of 5]

I need to collect my thoughts more on this collection before I have much to say about it as I think I would ramble on far too long with my likes and dislikes but never say much of anything that matters whatsoever.

Definitely deserves another read. Absolutely loved "Poem Written to Replace Another," and "Praise."

[Riah · Rating 3 out of 5]

This poetry is great, but I found it heavier than even I expected and I could only take it in a few doses. Definitely keep a "spoon full of sugar" around while reading this one!