Reviews and Comments

The poems here refer to standard forms without being strict about them. The section titled "Amherst Balladz" uses Emily Dickinson's style of capitalization and punctuation and short lines without much attention to the ballad meter, but still evokes an echo of her strangeness. The most characteristic feature in this collection is the choice of subject and imagery of which crosses the lines of polite social convention whenever it needs to as it makes its own point. At the beginning of this collection, in a section called Quarantine, and again at the end in one called Elegies, the poems focus on death and dying, with the last eleven describing her companion Carl Wallman's illness, last moments, and aftermath of death in just as honest and forceful a way the other poems do. In several others she talks about the neglect and abuse of her childhood in terms that make the shock of this just as real and as immediate as when it happened many decades ago.

The collection asks a reader to work alongside the poet and not take easy ways out of the labor, which can be exhilarating while demanding. It is a pleasure to experience how each of these is so carefully worked out especially after having read lesser verse by others where you could never get the sense that the author has real mastery of expression. The words the author uses take unexpected turns but with intention and control from years of perfecting her craft. This volume was a finalist for the National Book Award

This is the first book I've read by this celebrated author who came out with this particular work not long before the COVID-19 pandemic with its grief and trauma erupted, causing a big reception on social media then. She has been influenced by writers who take risks with characters who live on the edge. Here the protagonist is struggling with grief and trying to extinguish her consciousness through drugs for a year, believing it will wipe herself clean again. The writing makes it clear she is doing bad things, though not to get high, and subjects her to as much ridicule as anyone else. This is not as much a moral judgment as a description of the mental and physical process of abusing her body nearly to the point of death, with the gross parts left in. The disgusting sections serve a function, and even the nihilism gets a take-down here. The prose is precisely crafted whether describing mourning customs, status signals in the year 2000, or the aftermath of a manic blackout. The protagonist has little interest in sticking to norms of behavior in any but an a superficial, ironic fashion. At the same time, it goes deep into philosophy as we spend so much time inside the head of a person who is relentlessly pushing herself into areas that seem anti-life, destructive, but also banal.

I was thinking if this story had been instead an adventure about an astronaut sleeping while traveling to a distant star, how much would my attitude to the story change? Why or why not? Or if it were about a vampire unconscious in a casket through centuries? By the end of the story, there is a remarkable section where thoughts about art and ordinary activities suggest an entirely different attitude to the reason for conscious life which felt like it took the book into a whole different plane. I did not expect to like this book as much as I did even as I recognized that it would not be the sort of thing for so many people I know.

The audiobook narration by Julia Whelan brought out the dark humor and portrayed the annoying characters in a way that helped make them seem like real people. I was able to sense now and then that there was real pain going on alongside the nonsense.

This is a portal fantasy romance book with the two main characters coming from worlds connected by a pawnshop in Japan where customers exchange their memories and regrets for money. The new proprietor of the shop in the magical world, Hana, meets a scientist from our world named Keishin on her first day in business and the two embark on an adventure looking for Hana's father owing to their suspicions that he has set a series of events in motion which may soon subject them to a harsh penalty by the monstrous enforcers of this world. The two journey through a dizzying assortment of bizarre settings pursued by the bad guys, fearing death or torture. They discover secrets about Hana's past and about the world itself, and in the process fall in love. There are some harrowing scenes along the way, both with regard to the main duo and in flashback.

I myself am not a fan of the "romantasy" genre and had trouble accepting the scenes between Hana and Keishin, mostly told in dialogue which struck me as hard to believe. Hana was betrothed to another man in her world who both cared for her and was treated badly for helping them, and I didn't like what he suffered. Also, the way the characters' quest was structured seemed too easy. Without an ultimate goal in mind that they would have had to try to break down in steps, they instead just happened to go though a long series of incidents that just happened to advance them steadily along the way, over and over, as though they were on a railroad track the the destination. In the version of the book I read, the ending was a sort of epilogue to the main action that didn't feel completely earned. But other than these structural elements, I would like to give praise to the book for its innovative worldbuilding and the unusual vision of an otherworldly Japan, which I would not mind seeing in other stories by this author. I know this book will have a devoted fandom when it arrives in stores.

I read this book in the form of an advance reader copy through Netgalley in exchange for sharing my review

I've been a subscriber to this author's YouTube channel for some time now and so I was really eager to read this book when it came out. I have experienced my own losses over the years including my father in 2011 and my mother in 2021. They both died of the kind of chronic illnesses of old age that this book focuses on. Part of the process is just trying to understand what is happening and what the future has for options. So I wanted to understand better what experiences people who suffer from serious illnesses late in life and their caregivers to compare with what I have seen. Whether it's how to decide whether to allow extraordinary means to prolong life, how to deal with severe pain, I don't have any pressing need to act on these things but I do feel as if there's no time like the present to think about what I will want in the end and to learn what those around me ought to think about before they might face approaching death.

The author has excellent credentials having years as a registered nurse including years with a hospice company, and is generous with sharing lessons learned along the way with her viewers, and now her readers. Numerous times she gives reassurance to those wondering whether what they themselves are seeing is commonplace, based on what she knows about her patients. There are some things the American medical system does well and there are others where it falls short, and the difficult things she saw working previously as a nurse in intensive care nurse led her to change her field to hospice care. I think the segment of the medical industry occupied by doctors and specialists has a tendency to turn to technology to lengthen lifespan, even without an assurance of the quality of life. We are reminded that for thousands of years, people did not die in hospitals surrounded by machines, but at home surrounded by people they cared about, who knew that death could come any time. This book aims to provide information to help people who need to work around the broken parts of the present system while keeping the good parts.

Step by step this book takes the reader through the basics of what hospice and palliative care are about, how they differ, and what kind of relief they can offer. It tries to dispel the veils around a terminal diagnosis and to empower patients and their loved ones with information so they can make the decisions aimed to preserve the best in life. It dispels misconceptions about death, based on actual experience, and it is not afraid to go into regions beyond hard objective facts about the end of life such as visioning, patients who can override the dying process by exercising their will, and the deathbed rally. In some ways, this is the brightest, most comforting part of the story it tells. But any spiritual aspect to this book is not in service to any particular religion. Again and again it hones in on the three most important things when death is unavoidable: the need to be clean, safe, and comfortable. Beyond these three pillars all of the other matters a dying person might be burdened with can pale.

A lot of this talk about dying can be scary, so I really want to recommend the audiobook version of this read by the author. Her calm, compassionate, and down to earth delivery really does a lot to make the difficult parts easier to take in. I expect to seeing this book become a classic manual to be updated as our understanding changes over the years.

I really liked listening to the audiobook version of this read by the author. I think it's just really striking hearing his words in his own voice and giving the kind of emphasis he intended for each of the points in these short chapters. Not sure it would come across with quite as much impact reading what he wrote as words on a page. The author is best known for his place in the world of music as a producer and record company executive, but the book is really intended for an audience of creative people of all kinds. The idea goes far beyond the idea of just making music or generating new ideas or collaborating with others to produce art. The author's many years of developing the work of artists has made him think hard about what the point of art is in the first place, and the answer is not just getting paid for creating new things. He really seems genuine when he talks about what drives someone who has an artistic bent, it's not just something that he's learned to make up while dealing with musicians. He doesn't really make a big deal of his association with the famous in the studio or deciding edits on half-finished work or figuring out when it was time to stop tinkering with a song. So it isn't packed with memoir type anecdotes with big name musicians here. Everybody's heard about the artists with huge egos, those who drove themselves to madness, even suicide, those who committed terrible things believing them as measures necessary to continue to create art. Rather than sensationalism, it comes closer to asceticism to unlock the springs of creativity. Some people say that he's trying for a popular work of spirituality or philosophy as its guru, but he explicitly states that not everything he proposes will work for everyone. He's worked with so many different kinds of artist he knows it's futile to come up with a single prescription that'll work in every case. He lists the biggest kinds of obstacles and pitfalls that people encounter and he calls those out for people who want to avoid them in the first place. I didn't mind that a lot of the remedies are things found in other self-help, productivity, or wellness works. They don't have to be original tips to work. He gives really interesting clues on how an artist can focus on stripping things down to the essence, the way a producer cuts out unnecessary part of a mix, to get to the core of their message.

I keep a snapshot of the chapter titles in this book as a reference to dip back into this audiobook in the future when putting together my own work. I think anyone who has an artistic vision, whether in performance, or writing, or visual art can gain something by from this book and adapting some of his principles to their art. The spiritual overtones are not essential if that's not their vibe, but if they find even one bit of advice that is useful, latch onto it, leaving the rest, the book has accomplished its goal. Other books of this type like to hammer on just one simple formula and promise results automatically, without any work by the reader. This author instead says that the artist is key in choosing the appropriate starting point, with an open mind, to do great things, and I appreciate it.

I came to this collection by seeing some of the poems online and feeling drawn in by these odd fierce pieces by someone I hadn't heard of before. I wrote a couple of my own in response as I tried to figure out the secrets behind what she was doing, picking the lock, not imitating the style. Sometimes this exercise gives me something interesting in the end, even if I don't figure everything out. When I saw the book on sale when I was on vacation I bought it to try to learn more about this person I didn't know very well.

Some of the poems are arranged in little groupings, some in a section of their own, and many of them have titles used to describe poetic forms of the past two centuries in English. The poem "Villanelle" isn't itself a villanelle, and "Ballad from the Soundhole of an Unstrung Guitar" isn't in ballad meter. The images veer widely from musings on the literature to raw personal accounts. The language avoids complex structures as she does things like talking about the weird rhymes and rhythms Gerard Manley Hopkins words without trying to imitate them in her own lines, but they often still reveal complexities of thought. She is not bothered if some of her diction might be viewed as crude, shocking. The clearest things to me is seeing how she's wrapped up with the subject of literature, and how her writing sounds like it has a clear intention, even if I don't always understand what it might be, even if she says she used to fake her ideas of poetry back in school. I think it might be easier to appreciate these poems with a guide, but it's not necessary, just keeping an open mind.

I'm going to give it a top rating, even though I don't think that makes much sense. There is plenty of substance in this little book, like the best books of poetry, and the poems make me feel that even if I can't capture their ideas or technique, by reading them I might be able to come up with my own.