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A Handbook of Disappointed Fate
A Handbook of Disappointed Fate highlights a decade of Anne Boyer’s interrogative writing on poetry, death, love, lambs, and other impossible questions.
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First published May 1, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 70 reviews
September 2, 2018
I’m honestly a 25 year old undergrad student who has pursued a degree in social work on and off for the last 7 years and that just recently changed her major to English. With this background I certainly don't trust my ability to review this book and I'm not sure why anyone else would either, but it has given me more cathartic weeping, both sad and hopeful, than any other words I have ever read and to not vouch for that would be a shame.
I read every essay in A Handbook of Disappointed Fate--except the very last one-- back in March when Anne Boyer kindly mailed one to me. A Handbook of Disappointed Fate has meant so much to me that I wanted to hold on to it a bit longer but today I finally read the last essay, Death and The Handmaiden. Having finally finished it I suppose now is the best time to write about it, especially since I also spent the day rereading my favorites crying anew with each one, remembering the hope that these essays contain and ultimately reminding me of the power of words.
When I first read her essays I had never tried writing (for anything other than academia), had forgotten that reading held so much value and was honestly very terrified by my habit of circularly looking at the nature of power in macro systems, but most frighteningly, in micro interactions. I was simultaneously preoccupied and avoidant of the seemingly inescapable reality that this world is but this book gave me something that I have needed for a very long time.
Make no mistake, Anne Boyer would never dare promise you or I a world that is good. But I would never want that anyway, would reject it on contact. This is a handbook of dialectics, most of all. That the two things that have helped me immensely are Dialectical Behavioral Therapy and Anne Boyer's writing is no coincidence.
As someone who has self harmed for nine years, the idea of the material as protest, the body as refusal, is not unfamiliar. Neither, life being rendered cheap enough by this refusal to be paradoxically worth more than this "life," through death. This book is about the part language has to play in the realities that we live in and the realities we want want to live in. This book is about the way that words can mean the beginning of the upending of the systems of power, but to me, it is also about the way that words can mean the upending of my own maladaptive methods of refusal, which have rendered my existence barely recognizable.
In her poem "What Resembles the Grave But Isn't," resilience is triumph; in Death and The Maiden, resurrection is only torture and amusement for the audience. This dichotomy, it has and always will scare me. Perhaps it scares Anne Boyer too, I can only imagine. But this book has taught me that a refusal of poetics in which I rise from my grave with fortitude over and over again is a much better shot than a refusal in which a body is enacts its own disempowerment onto itself with such ambivalence.
This book has taught me that--in a world where I continue to show up to the third act despite the seemingly deterministic end for not wanting to be deprived of music (out of “free choice” or some mechanism of ultimate self preservation)--maybe the impossible is possible and the probable is not always so. Most importantly, this book has taught me that to even begin to allow at all for a new reality, we must first imagine and describe; that to bring such an improbability closer to our fingertips, we must also share it, enact it, be willing to move in and out of it with equal parts anger and tenderness. We must embrace the contradiction, must be always writing books in devotion to its harshness, its beauty
and to its necessity.
I read every essay in A Handbook of Disappointed Fate--except the very last one-- back in March when Anne Boyer kindly mailed one to me. A Handbook of Disappointed Fate has meant so much to me that I wanted to hold on to it a bit longer but today I finally read the last essay, Death and The Handmaiden. Having finally finished it I suppose now is the best time to write about it, especially since I also spent the day rereading my favorites crying anew with each one, remembering the hope that these essays contain and ultimately reminding me of the power of words.
When I first read her essays I had never tried writing (for anything other than academia), had forgotten that reading held so much value and was honestly very terrified by my habit of circularly looking at the nature of power in macro systems, but most frighteningly, in micro interactions. I was simultaneously preoccupied and avoidant of the seemingly inescapable reality that this world is but this book gave me something that I have needed for a very long time.
Make no mistake, Anne Boyer would never dare promise you or I a world that is good. But I would never want that anyway, would reject it on contact. This is a handbook of dialectics, most of all. That the two things that have helped me immensely are Dialectical Behavioral Therapy and Anne Boyer's writing is no coincidence.
As someone who has self harmed for nine years, the idea of the material as protest, the body as refusal, is not unfamiliar. Neither, life being rendered cheap enough by this refusal to be paradoxically worth more than this "life," through death. This book is about the part language has to play in the realities that we live in and the realities we want want to live in. This book is about the way that words can mean the beginning of the upending of the systems of power, but to me, it is also about the way that words can mean the upending of my own maladaptive methods of refusal, which have rendered my existence barely recognizable.
In her poem "What Resembles the Grave But Isn't," resilience is triumph; in Death and The Maiden, resurrection is only torture and amusement for the audience. This dichotomy, it has and always will scare me. Perhaps it scares Anne Boyer too, I can only imagine. But this book has taught me that a refusal of poetics in which I rise from my grave with fortitude over and over again is a much better shot than a refusal in which a body is enacts its own disempowerment onto itself with such ambivalence.
This book has taught me that--in a world where I continue to show up to the third act despite the seemingly deterministic end for not wanting to be deprived of music (out of “free choice” or some mechanism of ultimate self preservation)--maybe the impossible is possible and the probable is not always so. Most importantly, this book has taught me that to even begin to allow at all for a new reality, we must first imagine and describe; that to bring such an improbability closer to our fingertips, we must also share it, enact it, be willing to move in and out of it with equal parts anger and tenderness. We must embrace the contradiction, must be always writing books in devotion to its harshness, its beauty
and to its necessity.
May 4, 2021
I love a poet with a sense of humour, especially when it comes to playing with words, her material of also being serious when it is necessary. I have not read her poetry, but this book is pretty inviting in the sense that everything goes through poetry, music, politics, sickness, art. Great stuff.
February 8, 2021
A lot of writing — particularly in the field of memoirs — can feel formulaic. The author asserts an identity — whether tied to race, age, class, gender or illness — and narrates that identity for the edification of the other. In “Handbook of Disappointed Fate”, Anne Boyer turns that norm inside out and upside down.
According to Boyer, the oppressed individual who narrates their story within the framework of a language inherited by the system of oppression will inevitably end up rehearsing their own eulogy:
“The lamb who narrates the education provided to the lamb from its lambness is the type of lamb who confesses to wolves. To tell a story about being a lamb and to tell it in the language of wolves is to tell a story that is foreplay to the wolf’s pleasure, prelude to the lamb’s demise.”
In short: How does the lamb tell its story, in the language of wolves, without referring to itself as “dinner”? (And how do you name and discuss a problem without furthering it?)
To write as an act of resistance, one has to invent a new form, to construct a new language, to “take what is and shake it until change falls out of its pockets”. This does not mean reinventing the canon. It means flirting with the freedom of negation. The poetry of refusal. (Rachel Cusk covers similar ground in Coventry: “The woman writer might have to break everything — the sentence, the sequence, the novel form itself — to create her own literature.”)
The essays, fables, manifestos and poems in “Handbook” explore, to some extent, what this new form of literature might look like. Naturally, it is a book full of transpositions and up-endings, paradoxes and antinomies, disintegrations and inclusions. Topics include: Contemporary self-expression, language as mediator, the commodification of art, the failures of poetry, the distinction between what is profitable and what is important.
While many pieces in this collection were provocative and mind-expanding, others were too vague and too opaque for me to follow. But that is hardly the point. What Boyer offers here is an experimental roadmap, an invitation for others to expand upon and clarify:
“We brave our errors in thought for the possibility that to see them demonstrated will allow others to get towards a rightness we missed. We brave clumsy writing or speaking so that even in a crude form, a necessary idea will emerge as material for others to refine.”
“Handbook” is a book that stretches your mind, sometimes uncomfortably. The terrain is rugged and unfamiliar. The message often accessible only via multiple pivots of interpretation. But the experience, more often than not, is exhilarating. Here is a reminder to question, to disorder, to renovate, to refuse. Above all, this: “to never mistake dinner for the totality.”
Mood: Refreshing and challenging
Rating: 8/10
My favourite essays in the collection:
• No
• When the lambs rise up against the bird of prey
• A handbook of disappointed fate
• Erotology II: the long night
• Crush index
• Click-bait Thanatos
• Take up and read
• The harm
• Woman sitting at a machine
• The kinds of pictures she would have taken
• The dead woman
Also on Instagram.
Related review
The Undying
According to Boyer, the oppressed individual who narrates their story within the framework of a language inherited by the system of oppression will inevitably end up rehearsing their own eulogy:
“The lamb who narrates the education provided to the lamb from its lambness is the type of lamb who confesses to wolves. To tell a story about being a lamb and to tell it in the language of wolves is to tell a story that is foreplay to the wolf’s pleasure, prelude to the lamb’s demise.”
In short: How does the lamb tell its story, in the language of wolves, without referring to itself as “dinner”? (And how do you name and discuss a problem without furthering it?)
To write as an act of resistance, one has to invent a new form, to construct a new language, to “take what is and shake it until change falls out of its pockets”. This does not mean reinventing the canon. It means flirting with the freedom of negation. The poetry of refusal. (Rachel Cusk covers similar ground in Coventry: “The woman writer might have to break everything — the sentence, the sequence, the novel form itself — to create her own literature.”)
The essays, fables, manifestos and poems in “Handbook” explore, to some extent, what this new form of literature might look like. Naturally, it is a book full of transpositions and up-endings, paradoxes and antinomies, disintegrations and inclusions. Topics include: Contemporary self-expression, language as mediator, the commodification of art, the failures of poetry, the distinction between what is profitable and what is important.
While many pieces in this collection were provocative and mind-expanding, others were too vague and too opaque for me to follow. But that is hardly the point. What Boyer offers here is an experimental roadmap, an invitation for others to expand upon and clarify:
“We brave our errors in thought for the possibility that to see them demonstrated will allow others to get towards a rightness we missed. We brave clumsy writing or speaking so that even in a crude form, a necessary idea will emerge as material for others to refine.”
“Handbook” is a book that stretches your mind, sometimes uncomfortably. The terrain is rugged and unfamiliar. The message often accessible only via multiple pivots of interpretation. But the experience, more often than not, is exhilarating. Here is a reminder to question, to disorder, to renovate, to refuse. Above all, this: “to never mistake dinner for the totality.”
Mood: Refreshing and challenging
Rating: 8/10
My favourite essays in the collection:
• No
• When the lambs rise up against the bird of prey
• A handbook of disappointed fate
• Erotology II: the long night
• Crush index
• Click-bait Thanatos
• Take up and read
• The harm
• Woman sitting at a machine
• The kinds of pictures she would have taken
• The dead woman
Also on Instagram.
Related review
The Undying
November 12, 2020
“What surveils us says it knows us better than we know ourselves. And what everyone knows surveillance knows about us is that we don’t look very interesting. If there were some form of totality leak, and all of humanity were presented in the form of data before us it would be a laundry list of “sad” punctuated by accidental nefariousness. Tech-gaze delimits our species as fragile at best, brute at worst, and venal at the most predictable. A news feed having noticed an interest in cats, selects headlines about tortured kittens.”
A compilation of essays and short, creative non-fiction pieces from poet Anne Boyer representing over a decade of her prose; some are gossamer-like, others seep into the consciousness with unexpected force. Boyer can be infuriatingly oblique, irritatingly overblown, annoyingly aphoristic but she can also be insightful, charming, playful, ferocious and powerful. Here she covers a range of topics: the role of poetry in rejecting and refusing to be contained or cowed by oppressive forces; music from Bo Diddley to Mary J. Blige; Kansas City as ‘killer city’, the role of Occupy; racism, feminism and capitalism; and in between aspects of her own life, her projects and her recent treatments for breast cancer. In writing about what she refuses or what enrages or strikes or preoccupies her, she draws on sources that range from Colette, Pat Parker and Brecht, Marx, Nietzsche to Breton and Stendhal.
A compilation of essays and short, creative non-fiction pieces from poet Anne Boyer representing over a decade of her prose; some are gossamer-like, others seep into the consciousness with unexpected force. Boyer can be infuriatingly oblique, irritatingly overblown, annoyingly aphoristic but she can also be insightful, charming, playful, ferocious and powerful. Here she covers a range of topics: the role of poetry in rejecting and refusing to be contained or cowed by oppressive forces; music from Bo Diddley to Mary J. Blige; Kansas City as ‘killer city’, the role of Occupy; racism, feminism and capitalism; and in between aspects of her own life, her projects and her recent treatments for breast cancer. In writing about what she refuses or what enrages or strikes or preoccupies her, she draws on sources that range from Colette, Pat Parker and Brecht, Marx, Nietzsche to Breton and Stendhal.
May 6, 2022
Comme le dirait Olivia Tapiero (si je la connaissais personnellement et que j'avais un accès privilégié à son travail sur le livre de Boyer) ceci est
noueux as fuck
mais, oh combien jouissif.
Par moments, on dirait que Julio Cortazar et Gertrude Stein ont fait un bébé qui travaille maintenant chez Pitchfork juste pour troller.
Par moments, on dirait que Hilton Als et Monique Wittig se frenchent allègrement dans une ruelle pas du tout lugubre, comme éclairée de partout.
noueux as fuck
mais, oh combien jouissif.
Par moments, on dirait que Julio Cortazar et Gertrude Stein ont fait un bébé qui travaille maintenant chez Pitchfork juste pour troller.
Par moments, on dirait que Hilton Als et Monique Wittig se frenchent allègrement dans une ruelle pas du tout lugubre, comme éclairée de partout.
May 9, 2020
brb just shoving this a little deeper into my heart's pocket
June 3, 2020
Had a hard time with some of Boyer's writing that leaned more into being theory (a bunch of these essays it turns out started off as speeches she gave at places like "The Historical Materialism Conference in NYC"), but the writing that was a little more down-to-earth and that I could follow I really, really loved. The essays on Willie Nelson, Bo Diddley, Jo Spence, and love ("Erotology") were all SO wonderful, and there were a few essays on ideas for a new, utopian conception of the avant-garde that were very funny and even whimsical ("[The new avant-garde] will develop many languages, all of them like lovers to each other or aunties to children. These will probably be embarrassing."). The whole thing is so beautifully written and dense with ideas and I could feel my brain expanding with the way Boyer would often reframe difficult concepts with very beautiful poetic phrasing, the three stars are really just because I had trouble processing the more academic ideas buried in here.
January 30, 2022
when i have to focus on something v fine and finicky, like threading a needle, my stomach clenches. i don't feel sick, exactly, but the way the muscles tighten is uncomfortable, a bit queasy. the longer i focus, the more it makes me want to squirm, and as the thread frays, as i miss the eye again, the feeling rises like a tickle into my chest and then my throat, until it's unbearable and i have to put everything down and start again.
there are much worse feelings out there than this weird little sensation but like. it's also not something i look for or Enjoy ? and what boyer does with language in some of these pieces makes me feel it, the repetitive, attentive picking at words, the insistence, it feels like i'm reading with tweezers and my stomach is twitching and squeezing and, even though there's value to Carrying On, all my body wants to do is put it all down.
anyway, i have read 'no' before & i do still like it, i found new & beautiful things in the rest of the collection and i'm not Finished w boyer as a writer ! there were many ideas and phrases that made this worth reading ! this is just a first fr me re: words feeling like a physical & frustrating thing, and it's left me feeling fidgety and off.
there are much worse feelings out there than this weird little sensation but like. it's also not something i look for or Enjoy ? and what boyer does with language in some of these pieces makes me feel it, the repetitive, attentive picking at words, the insistence, it feels like i'm reading with tweezers and my stomach is twitching and squeezing and, even though there's value to Carrying On, all my body wants to do is put it all down.
anyway, i have read 'no' before & i do still like it, i found new & beautiful things in the rest of the collection and i'm not Finished w boyer as a writer ! there were many ideas and phrases that made this worth reading ! this is just a first fr me re: words feeling like a physical & frustrating thing, and it's left me feeling fidgety and off.
July 31, 2018
I maintain that Anne Boyer is America’s greatest living thinker, let alone poet.
December 4, 2021
anne boyer is het ene moment ongrijpbaar en het andere moment pakt ze je bij je lurven en schudt ze je tere ziel feilloos heen en weer
June 4, 2021
"You hold a face in your eyes a lot and say "I am a citizen of longing for that one person," but what you really mean is that you are a citizen of longing for the world."
April 3, 2024
anne boyer i was unfamiliar with your game.
June 19, 2022
"maneras difíciles de publicar poesía" es buenisisisimo 🥲
Read
May 24, 2020Boyer's collection was a mixed bag for me. The first set of articles were okay, a bright point here and there but a little hard to follow and sometimes, I thought, a little overwrought, like that extended lamb vs birds of prey analogy. Things started picking up about a third of the way through. The Erotology series and Crush Index were incredible ... agh. There are also some useful meditations on the relationship between aesthetics and politics (lol) in the second half. In one essay Boyer writes about how she and Fred Moten (!) had accidentally double-booked a room with The Burrito Project, which met to roll burritos for the hungry, and how she had to turn away people looking for the project because there was a reading going on instead. "Everyone who had entered the church, asking me the question – Is this the Burrito Project?," she writes, "reminded me that despite its fine qualities, poetry was a total fail at producing burrito." But she follows this with, "I suppose it's an old point and one I'm often learning, the mixed quality of our existing, the way one thing can never be everything – Bernadette Mayer's: 'This planet should be sent to a lunatic asylum / But it's not poetry's fault / For being so concerned / With love beauty sex and ideas.'" And I think that's about right, even if it's not exactly satisfying.
August 11, 2019
the purpose of poetry and essay is change. imagining that this is now that. but also, the purpose is to transform a feeling, a body, a skeleton, an injustice, into particles of language. i read this book in an all-female run tattoo shop in chicago, and recommended it to everyone sitting around me, drilling needles into my friend. i read this book while on a train through illinois, looking out at small towns and factories, stark brick and strange streams, thinking about work and capitalism but also poetry poetry poetry. some of this book was so much, so many words, abstract and so playful, i had to just read even if i didn't understand. that's life. i especially recommend the essays on kansas city, and most especially the essays on cancer and getting sick, the political or non-political body. can't stop thinking about jo spence. can't stop thinking about how poetry is less important than burritos, but we can't just eat burritos to live. to quote alice notley: "survival is not the right word for living on afterwards." i love that this book of essays isn't themed on just one thing, as anne boyer could have easily made a "breast cancer memoir". no. it's just what it says ~ a book on disappointed fate. and boyer's explosive thoughts, interrupting it all.
January 23, 2019
My husband bought this book for me for Christmas because he knows I love essays, and he saw it was highly recommended in New York magazine. I am going to be upfront here — I generally consider myself a thoughtful reader, unafraid to take on a challenge, but this book stopped me in my tracks. I read a blurb that described it as hilariously funny, and, while there were a couple of essays that I did find funny, I just couldn't help thinking these were the few bones Boyer threw to the idiots who picked the book up for it's curious cover and it's comfortable size. I admit, I am a poetry dilettante, so it's fair to say that Boyer's work is beyond my abilities - and I am dead serious here, not being facetious at all. I found the essays about her illness deeply moving, but others I just could not follow. I can admit my shortcomings: I can't follow Harold Pinter plays either, and the closest I've come to reading Proust is watching Little Miss Sunshine. I'm not proud of either of those things, but I'm going to have to add this book to that list. But really, don't go by me on this one, check it out for yourself.
May 11, 2018
A chapbook that collects Boyer's various writings--essays, mostly; published in out of the way places, mostly.
As with most collections, the pieces here are uneven, and also occasionally surprising. These are more revealing of biographical detail than Boyer's poetry, at least that which I've read, and I was surprised to see her writing so much about music. Many of these are experimental in the way D'Agata envisions for the essay: almost lyrical at times; some are lists; some are lists of imaginary ideas. These last are among my favorite, though I think the best is also her most revealing, "Please Stand Still," which is about a poetry reading in Los Angeles during a heat wave.
Boyer's voice is an odd combination of friendly and open alloyed with quick turns into academic jargon that can hide meaning more than reveal it. The voice works best in the more humorous pieces but otherwise, in my opinion, gets in the way of her meaning.
As with most collections, the pieces here are uneven, and also occasionally surprising. These are more revealing of biographical detail than Boyer's poetry, at least that which I've read, and I was surprised to see her writing so much about music. Many of these are experimental in the way D'Agata envisions for the essay: almost lyrical at times; some are lists; some are lists of imaginary ideas. These last are among my favorite, though I think the best is also her most revealing, "Please Stand Still," which is about a poetry reading in Los Angeles during a heat wave.
Boyer's voice is an odd combination of friendly and open alloyed with quick turns into academic jargon that can hide meaning more than reveal it. The voice works best in the more humorous pieces but otherwise, in my opinion, gets in the way of her meaning.
January 10, 2021
Anne Boyer’s political writing is very fun to read. The opening essay might be my favourite, but there were many enjoyable texts throughout this small collection. This is the opening paragraph of the book alluding to the Exodus and many other liberatory acts of negation:
“History is full of people who just didn’t. They said no thank you, turned away, escaped to the desert, lived in barrels, burned down their own houses, killed their rapists, pushed away dinner, meditated into the light. Even babies refuse, and the elderly also. Animals refuse: at the zoo they gaze through Plexiglas, fling feces at human faces. Classes refuse. The poor throw their lives onto barricades, and workers slow the line. Enslaved people have always refused, poisoning the feasts and aborting the embryos, and the diligent, flamboyant jaywalkers assert themselves against traffic as the first and foremost visible daily lesson in just not.”
Boyer quickly moves onto a beautiful poem by a fairly obscure Venezuelan poet named Miguel James:
My entire Oeuvre is against the police
If I write a Love poem it’s against the police
And if I sing the nakedness of bodies I sing against the police
And if I make this Earth a metaphor I make a metaphor against the police
If I speak wildly in my poems I speak against the police
And if I manage to create a poem it’s against the police
I haven’t written a single word, a verse, a stanza that isn’t against the police
All my prose is against the police
My entire Oeuvre
Including this poem
My whole Oeuvre
Is against the police.
Boyer also has this fantastic Brecht quote that alludes to Revelation 18, a chapter in the bible that was ringing through my mind for days following the uprising in the wake of George Floyd’s murder:
“So it is: The burghers have been bound to the millstones. Those who never saw the day have gone out into the light. So it is: The ebony poor boxes are being broken up; the noble sesban wood is cut up into beds. Behold, the capital city has collapsed in an hour. Behold, the poor of the land have become rich.”
Boyer’s writing of turning the world upside down and making what is isn’t are fascinating and beautifully poetic allusions to the book of Acts and the epistles to the Corinthians:
“Here’s how: take what is, and turn it upside down. Or take what is and make it what isn’t. Or take what isn’t and make it what is. Or take what is and shake it until change falls out of its pockets. Or take any hierarchy and plug the constituents of its bottom into the categories of its top. Or take any number of hierarchies and mix up their parts.”
These are the biblical allusions I encountered, but if I was more well-read generally I’m sure the texts here would have felt even richer.
Boyer’s writings on Kansas City and its Occupy movement were fascinating, and I love her commentary on other leftist poets. One of her essays on experiencing cancer treatment went into a brilliant exploration of healthcare’s commodification in the US, and she brings up poets like Audre Lorde, Karen Brodine, and Merle Woo (the latter two I had not previously been familiar with, and hope to read some time soon). This was a great collection of writing. Some of the more theory-oriented essays were above my head and a little opaque for me. But the more explicitly political essays landed very well for me and I enjoyed them a tremendous amount. Hope to return to Boyer again soon.
“History is full of people who just didn’t. They said no thank you, turned away, escaped to the desert, lived in barrels, burned down their own houses, killed their rapists, pushed away dinner, meditated into the light. Even babies refuse, and the elderly also. Animals refuse: at the zoo they gaze through Plexiglas, fling feces at human faces. Classes refuse. The poor throw their lives onto barricades, and workers slow the line. Enslaved people have always refused, poisoning the feasts and aborting the embryos, and the diligent, flamboyant jaywalkers assert themselves against traffic as the first and foremost visible daily lesson in just not.”
Boyer quickly moves onto a beautiful poem by a fairly obscure Venezuelan poet named Miguel James:
My entire Oeuvre is against the police
If I write a Love poem it’s against the police
And if I sing the nakedness of bodies I sing against the police
And if I make this Earth a metaphor I make a metaphor against the police
If I speak wildly in my poems I speak against the police
And if I manage to create a poem it’s against the police
I haven’t written a single word, a verse, a stanza that isn’t against the police
All my prose is against the police
My entire Oeuvre
Including this poem
My whole Oeuvre
Is against the police.
Boyer also has this fantastic Brecht quote that alludes to Revelation 18, a chapter in the bible that was ringing through my mind for days following the uprising in the wake of George Floyd’s murder:
“So it is: The burghers have been bound to the millstones. Those who never saw the day have gone out into the light. So it is: The ebony poor boxes are being broken up; the noble sesban wood is cut up into beds. Behold, the capital city has collapsed in an hour. Behold, the poor of the land have become rich.”
Boyer’s writing of turning the world upside down and making what is isn’t are fascinating and beautifully poetic allusions to the book of Acts and the epistles to the Corinthians:
“Here’s how: take what is, and turn it upside down. Or take what is and make it what isn’t. Or take what isn’t and make it what is. Or take what is and shake it until change falls out of its pockets. Or take any hierarchy and plug the constituents of its bottom into the categories of its top. Or take any number of hierarchies and mix up their parts.”
These are the biblical allusions I encountered, but if I was more well-read generally I’m sure the texts here would have felt even richer.
Boyer’s writings on Kansas City and its Occupy movement were fascinating, and I love her commentary on other leftist poets. One of her essays on experiencing cancer treatment went into a brilliant exploration of healthcare’s commodification in the US, and she brings up poets like Audre Lorde, Karen Brodine, and Merle Woo (the latter two I had not previously been familiar with, and hope to read some time soon). This was a great collection of writing. Some of the more theory-oriented essays were above my head and a little opaque for me. But the more explicitly political essays landed very well for me and I enjoyed them a tremendous amount. Hope to return to Boyer again soon.
August 28, 2023
I first read this in summer of 2020– I wasn’t in my body then. Upon re-reading I am struck by the alchemical effect of Anne Boyer’s peculiarity and truth-telling. I am remembering phrases that wedged their way into my mind from years ago— I am understanding them with renewed meaning. Sometimes language has the ability to summon a montage of memory; sometimes certain sentences crack open your heart because they seem to know your past, your fears. There is a commitment here, too, to playfulness— that in itself becomes a serious endeavor amidst subjects of catastrophe. Some really incredible meditations on women & illness, on city & body, on capitalism & dread & light. On desire, too, and how desire has become nearly synonymous with consumption/ possession. An expansive and ruthless questioning, too, of what poetry could be, what it’s been, what it might do.
From one of my favorite essays in here re: Mary J Blige’s career / perfume line — “she is made by it, then she makes it, and inside of that making, she pleads for it and its undoing” (60).
& from “Shotgun Willie”
“In those days I wrote poetry, conversed mostly with poets and in this felt like I was a ghost having a conversation with ghosts. In those days I was always gazing at the unreturning gaze of the world” (74)
“But this is going to turn into a party. We will dance soon. We will throw our coats in the corner…we will stay all night, dance a little longer, finally, and maybe even forget. But we will only do this because we can’t go home…there’s no getting out, so there is only getting together . The storm is here to stay, so we might as well have a good time” (75).
The Erotology series—
“To feel the wretched pain of a love after a love has long ended is not just to feel the pain at losing love but to feel pain at the way love turns a person into a possession that can be lost” (87).
From one of my favorite essays in here re: Mary J Blige’s career / perfume line — “she is made by it, then she makes it, and inside of that making, she pleads for it and its undoing” (60).
& from “Shotgun Willie”
“In those days I wrote poetry, conversed mostly with poets and in this felt like I was a ghost having a conversation with ghosts. In those days I was always gazing at the unreturning gaze of the world” (74)
“But this is going to turn into a party. We will dance soon. We will throw our coats in the corner…we will stay all night, dance a little longer, finally, and maybe even forget. But we will only do this because we can’t go home…there’s no getting out, so there is only getting together . The storm is here to stay, so we might as well have a good time” (75).
The Erotology series—
“To feel the wretched pain of a love after a love has long ended is not just to feel the pain at losing love but to feel pain at the way love turns a person into a possession that can be lost” (87).
October 22, 2019
This took me quite awhile to get through because damn is this some dense prose. Well worth the effort though - thoroughly enjoyed my time with it as well as getting good and riled up about being a woman worker and a unionist.
February 18, 2022
At times, I felt that Boyer was channeling Gertrude Stein. I cannot say that I completely grasped all of the material, and some essays I had to reread for clarity, but I loved Boyer's humor, compassion, and intellect.
January 15, 2020
the greatest writer
March 11, 2021
Some of this book is good that even though only 3 or 4 sections really grabbed me the whole work still warrants a perfect score
November 9, 2022
'the harm will come: it never doesn't.
December 7, 2019
more impenetrable than i expected but has very high highs and holds a lot of power
July 30, 2021
“every poem against the police is also and always a guardian of love for the world”
March 31, 2018
a very beautiful collection of lyric / essays & fabulations. cracking open the world with song.
August 12, 2022
Every essay was charged and never lost momentum. Some essays are more dense than others, but I was encouraged to take my time with each of Boyer's sentences. The way she writes about the body, the world, poetry, and art with unflinching honesty, clarity, curiosity, and silliness is inspiring.
October 28, 2018
yes to all this no! A poetry-essay book that, towards the end, takes a turn, and becomes about being sick and being a woman, and living in Our Time (capitalism, the heat of tomorrow, the feeling of the edge of apocalypse, but not being able to really embrace any framework of speaking about it) where sickness is also work without taking a break from the rest of the work (of work that pays the rent and being a woman esp in hetero world). I love when Boyer rejects the frame of either hero or victim (in the hero lies a terrible trap, that those who are worthy enough can survive - that is, continue living days after the ordeal), but how to depict or write about the body/experience of sickness that avoids that false choice?
October 31, 2018
anne boyer I would die for u
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