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How We Light
Poem after poem of Nick Sturm’s is the embodiment of pure benevolence and joy. Filled with virtuosic surprises at every turn, this, my friends, is the poetry of the future.
Noelle Kocot
Nick Sturm proclaims in the first poem of his collection, “I’m going to keep laughing until something gores me,” and proceeds to startle every page with his scaldingly funny, delightfully reckless linguistic breakdancing. How We Light is also a deeply moving book, a litany of heartbreaking assertions of what it means to be alive and mortal and surrounded and lonely and joyous and melancholy, at the same time, all the time. Sturm’s “basic guides” to autobiography, history, growing up, friendship, emergency, success, decision making, science, and truth will teach you more about how to be human than any self-help book. The instructions are that there are no instructions: “The pamphlet contains no information/regarding how little a bed can be or what/you are doing with those teacups.” Full of emotion and tenderness (and a kind of controlled anarchy), this is a book that will make the blood rush back into your brain.
Michael Dumanis
Noelle Kocot
Nick Sturm proclaims in the first poem of his collection, “I’m going to keep laughing until something gores me,” and proceeds to startle every page with his scaldingly funny, delightfully reckless linguistic breakdancing. How We Light is also a deeply moving book, a litany of heartbreaking assertions of what it means to be alive and mortal and surrounded and lonely and joyous and melancholy, at the same time, all the time. Sturm’s “basic guides” to autobiography, history, growing up, friendship, emergency, success, decision making, science, and truth will teach you more about how to be human than any self-help book. The instructions are that there are no instructions: “The pamphlet contains no information/regarding how little a bed can be or what/you are doing with those teacups.” Full of emotion and tenderness (and a kind of controlled anarchy), this is a book that will make the blood rush back into your brain.
Michael Dumanis
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2013
149 people want to read
About the author
Nick Sturm
12 books4 followersNick Sturm is the author of How We Light, from H_NGM_N Books, as well as a number of chapbooks including, with Wendy Xu, I Was Not Even Born (Coconut) and, with Carrie Lorig, Labor Day (Forklift, Ohio) and Nancy and the Dutch (NAP), an erasure of paperback biographies of Ronald and Nancy Regan. Poems have appeared in Black Warrior, Typo, PEN, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 14, 2013
Sturm rights those kind of new ecstatic lyrics that you kind of expect from Forklift, OH and H_NGM_N (who published this book), the kind of post-Whitman poem of transport where images build on images to a kind of climactic moment of seerlike clarity.
What Sturm does differently, though, than some of those writers, is to take a dark turn about halfway through most of the lyric poems here-- there's almost a depressive side to the mania in these poems, a recognition of failure, the inability to tap dance quite fast enough, and it gives these poems an emotional shading that's varied and interesting enough to sustain them.
The book's got four sections, two of shortish lyric poems, and then two long poems. The first of those didn't really work for me-- Sturm experiments without punctuation and breaks some of the formal and syntactic rules he maintained elsewhere in the book, which in itself isn't a bad thing. But instead of generating, I don't know, a polyphony of possible meanings, it kept shortcircuiting the energy I think it was trying to generate. In contrast, the second longer poem works better at sustaining itself in that Whitmanesque way. There are sections that I thought were kind of duff, like the shift to fragments, like kindling to build the poem up brighter, and to a lesser degree the run of questions. But overall, I do think it sustained it's energy over it's length. It read a little like a project-- how long can I stretch and sustain the concerns of one of the shorter poems, instead of trying to do something specific with that form-- but I think it succeeded on those terms, at least.
A decent book.
What Sturm does differently, though, than some of those writers, is to take a dark turn about halfway through most of the lyric poems here-- there's almost a depressive side to the mania in these poems, a recognition of failure, the inability to tap dance quite fast enough, and it gives these poems an emotional shading that's varied and interesting enough to sustain them.
The book's got four sections, two of shortish lyric poems, and then two long poems. The first of those didn't really work for me-- Sturm experiments without punctuation and breaks some of the formal and syntactic rules he maintained elsewhere in the book, which in itself isn't a bad thing. But instead of generating, I don't know, a polyphony of possible meanings, it kept shortcircuiting the energy I think it was trying to generate. In contrast, the second longer poem works better at sustaining itself in that Whitmanesque way. There are sections that I thought were kind of duff, like the shift to fragments, like kindling to build the poem up brighter, and to a lesser degree the run of questions. But overall, I do think it sustained it's energy over it's length. It read a little like a project-- how long can I stretch and sustain the concerns of one of the shorter poems, instead of trying to do something specific with that form-- but I think it succeeded on those terms, at least.
A decent book.
January 6, 2015
read this aloud to yourself in a low murmur while the sun dries a layer of morning dew on your skin and pool water kisses the skimmer on a tape loop to infinity and hope that you're building smiles out of these words that'll sustain you for months and years after all the joy runs out.
my current aesthetic: laguna beach season 2.
my current aesthetic: laguna beach season 2.
August 3, 2013
Manic and delicious. This is the kind of poetry shit that could really get people hopped up on all this poetry shit.
August 17, 2013
A great book of poetry, full of smart and funny stuff as well as some heartbreaking poems. Very entertaining and a quick read.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews