Notes for My Body Double

by Paul Guest

Who would guess that Godzilla, the Invisible Man, Elvis, Donald Duck, Ted Williams, and the Three Stooges might have something to say about the love and loss that shape the way we see the world? And yet these are the pop-culture coordinates that chart the emotional life brilliantly mapped out in Paul Guest's second book of poems. Winner of the Prairie Schooner Prize in Poetry, this collection plumbs the depths of nature and culture (how, for instance, "gar" in Old English means "spear," and an octopus can lose a limb during mating) to give form to the darkness and the light that make us human.

Genres: Poetry

78 pages, ebook

First published October 1, 2007

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

[C · Rating 4 out of 5]

"...Love, you know
that language failed me
early with you: in my mouth you found
a hidden stammer. In all
the days since, what have I said
that was right? So little.
But know: when we stood on one side
of thick glass to watch
a world of water ignore our entire lives,
I kissed your fingers
and each one in that light was blue."

-from "Water"

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

No, I didn’t wait for you
or sleep much at all
or raise one hope like a rag to wipe my lost face.
*

the way certain memories intrude
upon whole days, voiding

the certain beauty of one magnolia
after another.
*
Maybe you wake up knotted in your bedclothes
and what you thought your life was, it isn’t:
and whatever that was you’re forgetting anyway.
[…]
No one here sells the map of all your memories.
*
What will I do with my days
now that my nights
are sublimely alone
and how will I make use of this wound
I carried like a map
so that I would never, never
lose you?

[silas denver melvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

stunner

[astrid · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's late again
and the moon
teaches me stealth
and borrowed light
and lowered gravity
and before sleep
let me say
my apologies
like a prayer,
to you,
let me miss you as long as I'm alive.

took a poetry workshop last year for the first semester of my junior year at uni and it kinda changed my life and deepened my love for reading poetry so... first book of the year is a poetry book :] liked this one a lot, especially apologia and in praise of the defective.

[Michele Benson · Rating 4 out of 5]

You have to read this book slowly and savor the words. My favorite poems were Cartoonist in Hell ("Johnny Quest/no one remembers you/ I ask") and Questions for Godzilla ("You of the plastic-leather, pebbled Pleistocene flesh...") See, how great is that? This is contemporary, fun, and thoughtful poetry. Everyone should read it.

[eshin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book centred around the grievous and joy-inducing love. Many poems will strike you raw. When you slow down you will understand the speaker’s pain and loneliness that runs through every poem, how it is caused or stopped by the other person. So many beautiful lines you will be lost by its meaning. Adore adore adore

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mixed feelings about this one. Titles that drew me to the book in the first place ("A poem called 'Questions for Godzilla'! Who is this guy?") ended up being the phoniest/flattest of all. It's not that all the pop-culture nerdy stuff falls flat, but some of it does, esp. when paired with Romantic sentiment and lyrical fluffiness, e.g. long rhetorical questions with no weight behind them. The last line of the Godzilla poem is, "What is pain to you?" Uh, nothing, 'cause Godzilla's not real. The line wouldn't seem as bad if it weren't built up to so much, ending a sentence that spans the poem's forty or so lines, with an extra-long penultimate line for contrast.

So yes, certain poems left a bad taste in my mouth. And as other reviewers have pointed out, there is a formal consistency to the collection that, combined with titles like "Nothing" and "Erasure" and "Water," tends to make individual poems wash together, ha ha. But I'll definitely remember some poems whole. "Elba" recounts a brief story of the poet's conversation with a stewardess, whose name reminds him of Napoleon and Bugs Bunny. (Here, the pop culture reference doesn't overwhelm the poem but adds dimension.) She steers the conversation to the poet's paralysis; he regrets her pity and he deflects by returning to Napoleon:

"some now think [he] died
of a hormonal disease
slowly making him a woman,
his body white, smooth, hairless,
with breasts a physician thought beautiful,
and though she smiles
I can't tell which story she no longer
wants to know."

If nothing else, the book taught me a lot of awesome trivia (I'm not surprised his next book is called My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge), and here the poet weaves it so well in to the story that it doesn't seem like a gimmick, this geeky historical factoid. I would read more of Guest's work, but I hope more of the poems differ and have, like, stanzas and stuff.

[Stephanie Edwards · Rating 2 out of 5]

I know you're not supposed to criticize him because he's paraplegic, but I really don't like this book, at all. The first few poems I did like, but somehow as I read more of the poems, I began to like them progressively less (and that doesn't usually happen for me when reading a book of poetry. Usually, it's more the opposite). Also, for several of the poems, I really liked the beginnings, but then I got really disappointed by their arrivals. I felt like everything was going to the same place, and I got tired of it. Although, maybe that's the point of the book. I imagine one would get very restless with continuously finding themselves paralyzed.

[Heather Gibbons · Rating 3 out of 5]

The best of these poems use rhetoric, humor, juxtaposition, and self-depreciation to great effect. I got bored halfway through with the lack of any formal variation (if you squint, they all look the same!) and started to feel like the lines weren't as carefully-wrought as they could be, but I was re-engaged by the end (ok, maybe I skipped a few).

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite poems are honest and filled with the gruesome imagery of the human condition. They reveal something about humanity that we mask in our everyday lives. Notes for My Body Double by Paul Guest delivers! Even though it felt many of the poems were often quite similar in style, I enjoyed every single one. I think it is best to take this book a handful of poems a day.

[Tim Lepczyk · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poems in this collection were really moving. At times steeped in isolation and loneliness, but never asking for pity or sympathy. The poems are mainly about a man in love with the world even though it doesn't always provide. My favorite was "Questions for Godzilla."

[Patrice · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a gifted man who is unafraid to give freely of himself. His range is vast, and I am humbled by his sense of humor--and his honesty.

[DRM · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn't even finish this "look how post modern I'm being" piece of shit.