See Me Improving

by Travis Nichols

See Me Improving invites readers into a world gone strange, where everyday human behaviors become fraught with extraordinary significance. "We've all been to that dark space," Travis Nichols writes; "What quiet deal did you make?" In his second collection, poet and novelist Nichols makes history out of our contemporary landscape, a place inhabited by curious dreams and lies, love stories, and vertiginous leaps of logic.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2010

About the author

Travis Nichols was born and raised in Ames, Iowa. He lives in Chicago and is an editor at the Poetry Foundation. His writing has appeared in the Believer, the Huffington Post, Paste, the Stranger, and the Village Voice. His books include the poetry collection Iowa (Letter Machine Editions) and the novel Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder (Coffee House Press).

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Reviews

[David Anthony Sam · Rating 2 out of 5]

Travis Nichols writes “A poem needs a reader—how will I seduce you?” There are moments, lines, images when Nichols nears his goal of seduction. But overall this collection fails. Nichols often writes overweening attempts at a kind of surrealism that simply strain or even approach the inane

One of the title poems tries hard but strains:

Tomorrow in a kindergarten of trees
a carrot will spurt
from a small hole in the ground
and pin the berserk heart
of a rabbit to the sun

“A Poem from Bled” is one of the better attempts.

His poem, “New England,” seems to be Nichols version of Dickinson’s definition of poetry: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry." But Nichols version is a bit silly, including such lines as:

When my scalp retreats
to the back of my skull
and my intestine fires flare
Through their tubes, I know
I am beginning....
“Ding Dong!”
I yell...

With some editing and rewriting, there is promise here. I hope future work by Nichols lives up to the title and shows improvement.

[Kat Heatherington · Rating 4 out of 5]

as improbable as it is necessary. Nichols' voice is highly individual, and wherever he's going, it's not where you think it is. yet his language is almost austere in its directness. I love it.

[Heather · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't particularly like this book after my first reading of it: it seemed somehow both too strange and too ordinary, with more humor and less beauty than I like the poetry I read to have, but I decided to give it another try. It's a short book, and maybe part of my problem the first time around was that the subway is perhaps not the most conducive reading atmosphere for an unfamiliar book of poems: too many distractions. I did like it more the second time through, though there is still plenty of strangeness ("so paddle with vacuous cheer/into your fat bottle of pink soda and I will plunge/into some sunny buttocks with the grace of God's eraser" - in "A Poem from Bled," a slightly different version of which appears here) and ordinariness (a poem about drunkenly texting one's friends on a bus ride, just to say you're drunk). But there are also poems whose strangeness somehow entirely works, like "Wild Is the Wind". And there are bits of beauty, like this, from the start of "On the 730th Day God Made Me Happy," which I think is my favorite poem in the whole book:

I dreamt we fell in love.
You bought new sheets for the bed
and made dinner from breadcrumbs
and yellow squash. The red-fringed ivy bobbed
as the wind touched it,
stirring the building to feel. (27)

[AnandaTashie]

I'm not going to rate this since I've only read 1/3 of it. (If I did, I would put it right at 2 stars. Pretty sure that's how it would remain if I continued reading to at least the 1/2 way point. I don't WANT to read more though.)

I found the images to be odd and over-the-top, and the poems as a whole don't especially speak to me. For example: "I yell, "Ding Dong!" and the sky bursts / open like a boil and a branch flies / from my mouth and plunges into a cloud..." Or, another: "and I refuse to hang myself / with ropes of dried ostrich blood / just so the illusion of ease may prevail / over every greasy bedpost. / Take off, greasy bedpost!" Eh.

I do still like the stanza on the back of the book, the one that led me to check it out from the library in the first place: "I dreamt we fell in love. / You bought new sheets for the bed / and made dinner from breadcrumbs / and yellow squash. The red-fringed ivy bobbed / as the wind touched it, / stirring the building to feel." I also liked: "Remember, that if you breathe, / our music will be swept inside of you forever."

[Jim Laczkowski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just finished this & i loved it. "Aim High" and"New Privacy" floored me as did the brief little untitled snippets towards the beginning. I liked the one about the birds and the "Eulogy For What Will Take Care Of You." Weird imagery & phrasing, but also very sexual & romantic at times. My favorite poems veer between unusual, unconventional descriptions about feelings and moments that don't make sense - to creating a three-dimensional scene that feels so real you can picture it. There are moments where Nichols does both within the same poem. The excerpt on the back is what made me buy it, and you should too:



"I dreamt we fell in love.
You bought new sheets for the bed
and made dinner from breadcrumbs
and yellow squash. The red-fringed ivy bobbed
as the wind touched it,
stirring the building to feel"

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

From See Me Improving by Travis Nichols:

Blue Prince of Breath

She is a series of small movements.
Two unparallel shadows on the stair.
The soft yellows strike the walls around her,
swell and cast bells through the tubes between us.
Such an emergency presupposes a world,
ugly and unlike a dream,
where I am everyone.
I look at her as if she were paint.
She looks at me as if I were felt.
My heart, snug and dry in her underwear,
opens an idea behind me,
a foreign syntax betwixt her boots and overcoat.
The idea of her legs over the next.
One over the other.

[Mary C · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a follow up to his previous work "Iowa", "See Me Improving" shows the reader just that. Nichols change in style allows for a much more colloquial tone while still dealing with the almost magical sides of reality that he seems immensely capable of encapsulating.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://therumpus.net/2011/01/lets-flo...

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

i have been waiting a decade for this book