Bad Hobby: Poems

by Kathy Fagan

From Kingsley Tufts Award finalist Kathy Fagan comes Bad Hobby , a perceptive collection focused on memory, class, and might-have-beens. In a working-class family that considers sensitivity a “fatal diagnosis,” how does a child grow up to be a poet? What happens when a body “meant to bend & breed” opts not to, then finds itself performing the labor of care regardless? Why do we think our “common griefs” so singular? Bad Hobby is a hard-earned meditation on questions like these—a dreamscape speckled with swans, ghosts, and weather updates. Fagan writes with a kind of practical empathy, lamenting pain and brutality while knowing, also, their inevitability. A dementing father, a squirrel limp in the talons of a hawk, a “child who won’t ever get born”: with age, Fagan posits, the impact of ordeals like these changes. Loss becomes instructive. Solitude becomes a shared experience. “You think your one life precious—” And Bad Hobby thinks—hard. About lineage, about caregiving. About time. It paces “inside its head, gazing skyward for a noun or phrase to / shatter the glass of our locked cars & save us.” And it does want to save us, or at least lift us, even in the face of immense bleakness, or loneliness, or the body changing, failing. “Don’t worry, baby,” Fagan tells us, the sparrow at her window. “We’re okay.”

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

First published September 13, 2022

Reviews

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Accuweather predicts 'episodes of sunshine' --
No doubt it's streaming.
In one episode, sun backlights the roses and the rosemary.
In the next, it turns birdfeeders bright as lanterns.
In the third (I'm binge-watching now) mist withdraws
slowly
from
the
grass."

There is a running theme of caring for her father in early stages of dementia. He confuses words - the "Bad Hobby" title refers to his admonishment of Fagan smoking: "Don't ever smoke, Kath...it's a bad hobby." - and his admission to a care facility. This new stage recalls earlier stages of life and their relationship over the years. Other poems (like Accuweather, above) are funny and clever, more observational in tone.

Goodreads reminds me that I've read another Fagan a few years back (Sycamore: Poems, 2017), but unfortunately it made no lasting impression, whereas this one blew me away. Perhaps a re-read is in order, or maybe Bad Hobby just worked for me in this moment. Whatever it is, I loved Fagan's blend of clever / playful language and pathos.

5/5*

[Ada · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un llibre que retrata el moment en que un dels pares és mort i l'altre encara viu. El dol per la mare que ja no hi és i el comiat pel pare que viu amb una demència i que només vol morir.

[k-os · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fagan milked this BAD HOBBY horse for every cent. (She's better at poetry than me, I promise.) Loved this collection. Great movement in the poems and often a gosh-wow ending.

[Connor · Rating 4 out of 5]

"winter / is so gray here the sight of a single cardinal / can keep us warm for days."

"Did I imagine that our textbooks used the word / neutral and the word humane / interchangeably?"

[Dora Prieto · Rating 5 out of 5]

So gorgeous... my favourite poem was "Dahlia." A deep, funny, and sometimes disturbing read (always haunting) with a distinct middle-aged woman voice that I don't get enough of in poetry.

[Jude Brigley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marvellous collection.

[Deirdre Fagan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning collection with ruminations on multigenerational loss, love, grief, pleasure, mortality.... "Death is not this the sunshine?" Indeed it is.