What do you think?
Rate this book
I Will Take the Answer: Essays
A moving and wide-ranging collection of essays by the author of Letter to a Future Lover
The idea of connection permeates I Will Take the Answer , Ander Monson’s fourth book of utterly original and intelligent essays. How is our present connected to our past and future? How do neural connections form memories, and why do we recall them when we do? And how do we connect with one another in meaningful ways across time and space?
In the opening essay, which extends across the book in brief subsequent pieces, a trip through a storm sewer in Tucson inspires Monson to trace the city’s relationship to Jared Lee Loughner, the gunman who shot Gabrielle Giffords and killed six bystanders, along with how violence is produced and how we grieve and honor the dead. With the formally inventive “I in River,” he ruminates on water in a waterless city and the structures we use to attempt to contain and control it. Monson also visits the exuberantly nerdy kingdom of a Renaissance Faire, and elaborates on the enduring appeal of sad songs through the lens of March Sadness, an online competition that he cofounded, an engaging riff on the NCAA basketball tournament brackets in which sad songs replace teams.
As personal and idiosyncratic as the best mixtape, I Will Take the Answer showcases Monson’s deep thinking and broad-ranging interests, his sly wit, his soft spot for heavy metal, and his ability to tunnel deeply into the odd and revealing, sometimes subterranean, worlds of American life.
The idea of connection permeates I Will Take the Answer , Ander Monson’s fourth book of utterly original and intelligent essays. How is our present connected to our past and future? How do neural connections form memories, and why do we recall them when we do? And how do we connect with one another in meaningful ways across time and space?
In the opening essay, which extends across the book in brief subsequent pieces, a trip through a storm sewer in Tucson inspires Monson to trace the city’s relationship to Jared Lee Loughner, the gunman who shot Gabrielle Giffords and killed six bystanders, along with how violence is produced and how we grieve and honor the dead. With the formally inventive “I in River,” he ruminates on water in a waterless city and the structures we use to attempt to contain and control it. Monson also visits the exuberantly nerdy kingdom of a Renaissance Faire, and elaborates on the enduring appeal of sad songs through the lens of March Sadness, an online competition that he cofounded, an engaging riff on the NCAA basketball tournament brackets in which sad songs replace teams.
As personal and idiosyncratic as the best mixtape, I Will Take the Answer showcases Monson’s deep thinking and broad-ranging interests, his sly wit, his soft spot for heavy metal, and his ability to tunnel deeply into the odd and revealing, sometimes subterranean, worlds of American life.
- GenresEssaysNonfiction
224 pages, Paperback
First published February 4, 2020
16 people are currently reading
421 people want to read
About the author
Ander Monson
29 books67 followersAnder Monson is the author of Vanishing Point; Neck Deep and Other Predicaments, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize; the novel Other Electricities; and the poetry collections Vacationland and The Available World. He lives and teaches in Arizona and edits the magazine DIAGRAM.
Although Ander is a proud graduate of Knox College, he also received advanced degrees from Iowa State and the University of Alabama.
More info is available here.
http://poetry.arizona.edu/presenter-a...
Although Ander is a proud graduate of Knox College, he also received advanced degrees from Iowa State and the University of Alabama.
More info is available here.
http://poetry.arizona.edu/presenter-a...
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
May 23, 2021
I wish one of my friends had written I Will Take The Answer. Or something like it. It's as disorienting as it is intimate to join Ander on all of his meanderings: through space, memory, and reflection.
Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to briefly live in another person's mind (would it even make sense?) and this book came very close to what I imagine that to be. It's circuitous, but lucid. Ander sometimes pauses to consider a deeper truth, before promptly jumping to some other related musing. It can feel jarring and frustrating. Maybe a little too much like being in his head!
But it's a huge, wonderful foraging effort. Everything forged by man and nature is appropriated--from oversized Christmas decorations to saguaros, from mystery mixtapes to thalwegs--and tells a story. Sometimes it's hard to tell whether it's a Big Human Story or just Ander's. And though the collection can feel clunky, he usually brings it all together to speak to some fascinating questions, like: why are we drawn to sad songs? Why are we drawn to catastrophe? And my personal favorite: "We--or most of us mortals--can't bear being surrounded all our lives by the dead and by our feelings for them. We need a ceremony to set them free, we say. Or are we the ones we're setting free? Is that selfishness or is it simply living?" (119).
There are moments of arrogance, times where Ander retreats inward faster than I can keep up. Sometimes he's just really mean about people's tastes in music; sometimes he finds the shadows I rather wouldn't acknowledge (look at something sideways, and it becomes embarrassingly clear). It's not always easy or likeable. But wouldn't it be something if everyone could write themselves down like this?
Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to briefly live in another person's mind (would it even make sense?) and this book came very close to what I imagine that to be. It's circuitous, but lucid. Ander sometimes pauses to consider a deeper truth, before promptly jumping to some other related musing. It can feel jarring and frustrating. Maybe a little too much like being in his head!
But it's a huge, wonderful foraging effort. Everything forged by man and nature is appropriated--from oversized Christmas decorations to saguaros, from mystery mixtapes to thalwegs--and tells a story. Sometimes it's hard to tell whether it's a Big Human Story or just Ander's. And though the collection can feel clunky, he usually brings it all together to speak to some fascinating questions, like: why are we drawn to sad songs? Why are we drawn to catastrophe? And my personal favorite: "We--or most of us mortals--can't bear being surrounded all our lives by the dead and by our feelings for them. We need a ceremony to set them free, we say. Or are we the ones we're setting free? Is that selfishness or is it simply living?" (119).
There are moments of arrogance, times where Ander retreats inward faster than I can keep up. Sometimes he's just really mean about people's tastes in music; sometimes he finds the shadows I rather wouldn't acknowledge (look at something sideways, and it becomes embarrassingly clear). It's not always easy or likeable. But wouldn't it be something if everyone could write themselves down like this?
January 21, 2021
I Will Take the Answer is as invested in form as it is in meaning. In fact, most of the time, the deepest meanings come from the form. These essays are full of linguistic and structural acrobatics. They invite you to swing on their trapeze.
January 20, 2021
This series of long and short essays seemed to me to be variously long and short on providing the reader with enough entertainment value. Clearly the author is a talented writer. Some stories could have been fleshed out more fully, others tended to cover aspects of the same territory of previous essays. Overall, the subjects were of general interest but tended to drift into other unrelated places. I found the book to be easy to put down.
Read
January 22, 2020Looking for an essay collection that's somehow both incisive yet delightfully meandering? This one's got you covered.
February 24, 2020
Favorite essays: I in river, My Monument, Long Live the Jart
abandoned
April 15, 2021Too rambling. Too scattered. Read just a little more than one chapter and decided to bounce.
April 30, 2021
Didn't work for me.
April 7, 2022
An eccentric collection of essays that aren’t exactly interconnected so much as they echo each other throughout. You can tell Monson enjoys writing in a pure, linguistic sense; he has fun with language, which makes him fun to read.
These essays feel true to the experience of coming up with an idea — an observation turns into an association which then puts two (or several) ideas side-by-side, ready for investigation. The result is consistently surprising and often revealing.
Toward the end of most of the essays, Monson tends to pile questions on top of each other. It's an effective technique, and a statement of purpose: we are all living amid quandaries and mysteries, searching for ways to make sense of it all. We will take whatever answers we can find.
These essays feel true to the experience of coming up with an idea — an observation turns into an association which then puts two (or several) ideas side-by-side, ready for investigation. The result is consistently surprising and often revealing.
Toward the end of most of the essays, Monson tends to pile questions on top of each other. It's an effective technique, and a statement of purpose: we are all living amid quandaries and mysteries, searching for ways to make sense of it all. We will take whatever answers we can find.
May 20, 2025
when Ander Monson is good, I believe he is one of the best alive — but this does feel like a warning of what can happen when you feel the need to write 16 essays instead of 4, for whatever reason. some VERY interesting stories of obsession in here (being able to have “I in River” on my shelf in hard copy is worth it on its own) and also some stuff that’s a straight up STRETCH
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews