I finished this a while ago and forgot to leave a review…. Don‘t know how that happened.

Proust is so deep and dense that you have to really want it, in my opinion—I mean want to read it—in order to make it happen. I‘ve said it before but: casually reading the text doesn‘t give the reader what I think is intended. Many of the concepts require rereads and cerebration. It can be headachey at times (okay, a lot of times); headachingly original.

Of course I wish that I personally were better-looking, and of course I enjoy the validation of feeling that I do look good, but to confuse these basically auto-erotic or status-driven impulses with real aesthetic experience seems to me an extremely serious mistake for anyone who cares about culture.

Stepping into my basic bitch era….

Heartrending, aching work that feels so timely and important. Every line strikes in the gut, relatable in its despair mixed with longing. The verse is sonorous and the metonyms interesting. Burrow into it and explore.

Really enjoying this, yet I‘m ready for something different. (This is often the case for me.)

Like flowing water,
I will come to you.
Like alcohol dissolving in water,
like nicotine congealing in alcohol,
like caffeine coating nicotine,
I will come to you.
Like syphilis germs flowing through veins,
like death gripping life.

the alcohol, with its heightened effect on the nerves, had filled the present minutes with a quality and a charm whose effect had not been to make me more able, or even more willing, to defend myself against them: my state of lightheadedness segregated them from the rest of my life and made me see them as vastly preferable to it; I was trapped in the present, as heroes are, or drunkards[.]

Brilliant, experimental work that is more focused on form and words than content…I love work like this, as I get as much out of viewing poetry as art, mood, and image as I do from narrative terms.

It came out in 1970, but it vibrates strongly today. It‘s also a fast read because many of the pages are nearly blank: words along the edges of the pages; blocks of text that insist we remember that letters are mere symbols which we give meaning to.

I had no difficulty in convincing myself that I should really be happy about all this, and my hope that such happiness would never leave me was as strong as my knowledge that I had never in fact felt it. The joys we most dread losing are those that have remained outside us, beyond the reach of our heart.

So sooner though blasted
the lone ilk fades
in shimmering soft outlasted
nary lead yet they to whom
a purple had no power
withstood the wormy past
of dust now bowered
musk and stale nodes that reached their crest

Wild poetry that feels very now, current day, but also, who knows, could last and last.

Everything is written as though keeping an eye on the internet, and it embraces media in many forms, filled with references, song lyrics, intentionally mangled quotes, which are noted in the acknowledgement. It makes the material feel rich and alive. Hilliard is unafraid to be experimental and ambitious!

Nearly a couple hundred pages into this, and loving it so far. I am having a major hankering to read fiction that‘s contemporary though. The last contemporary fiction I read was “Jerusalem,” which took forever, and somehow didn‘t feel that modern. I mean, parts of it did, but not altogether.

For, after all, my mind had to be a single thing; or perhaps there is only a single mind, in which everybody has a share, a mind to which all of us look, isolated though each of us is within a private body, just as at the theater, where, though every spectator sits in a separate place, there is only one stage.

& eff you‘re trying hard not to hurt anyone
but yourself & yourself is super shit @ it
than i , 2 , have been beating back the green
with you , allalong , furrowed round joy‘s means .
I am so here ! So here to hav you here ! H!appy

how I am 2 tellya , about Happiness . Eff you
haven‘t yet heard of happiness it‘s only bc

This was great the first time around, much better the second.

I love Proust and his cool sentences, as well as his observations. This is the type of thing you have to read slow to absorb it, and understand the full depth of the ideas he‘s conveying. It‘s definitely not something to just run through so as to be able to say you read it.

Basically, the text gives back what you put into it. This is usually the case but even more so for Proust imo.

I had no greater desire than to see a storm at sea, not so much because it would be a beautiful spectacle as because it would be a moment of nature‘s real life unveiled; or rather for me there were no beautiful spectacles except the ones which I knew were not artificially contrived for my pleasure, but were necessary, unchangeable—the beauties of landscapes or of great art.

Well, count me in the small group who has read this in its entirety….

It‘s been the biggest reading-related undertaking of my life.

Took me six months to read…more probably. Many sections I read twice.

I‘m noticing this review is mostly about me rather than anything having to do with the book. Good. That fits with what this book is like, if that makes any sense.

I‘ll say this: I‘m heavily impressed that this thing exists. I‘m glad it exists.

Sometimes these damages are delivered only to save ,
only to teach , only to demonstrate how love comes back in , always ,
to where it always was , bit by bit.

one thing love and death have in common, more than those vague resemblances people are always talking about, is that they make us question more deeply, for fear that its reality will slip away from us, the mystery of personality.

At this point I‘m confident I‘m the only person, besides the author himself, who has read this thing in its entirety.

Even before seeing Odette there, even if he did not manage to see her, what happiness it would give him to step on that earth where, not knowing the exact location, at any given moment, of her presence, he would feel palpitating everywhere the possibility of her sudden appearance….

who doesn‘t love a good war ? well perhaps
those getting shot . but then— who doesn‘t
love a good warflik ? an opportunity tew get
choked out then choked up . eyes water .
eyes always water . Nickelodeons , some of
the first American theaters , could not show
certain films for fear of riot. & aint tht luv?

Gorgeous work from an extremely skilled poet. Some of the lines are scathing and taut, others relaxed and conversational, and she mixes these moods with a deftness that is impressive, keeping it alluring yet confusing, persuading me to go back and reread each poem line by line immediately after I‘d finish it—or finish a stanza!

There‘s also a sweet tenderness to the work that I don‘t see so often, which I appreciate.

When he makes his way along a hairline alley to the building‘s rear the Saxon chapel seems to him ablaze with moment and significance as if he‘s looking at it for the first time or the last, and in Narrow Toe Lane he finds he cannot see for tears although he doesn‘t know what they‘re in aid of and within a dozen paces has forgotten them.

Only a thousand+ pages deep into this…no big deal.

I am cold in this house this house
Whose washed echoes are tremulous down lost halls.
I am a woman, and dusty, standing among new affairs.
I am a woman who hurries through her prayers.

Whether it is that the faith which creates has dried up in me, or that reality takes shape in memory alone, the flowers I am shown today for the first time do not seem to me to be real flowers.

I did it! I got through that languagey section I was mentioning before on here!

Such a relief to be back into normal English…I can read so much faster.

Even I preferred cream cheese when it was pink, when I had been allowed to crush strawberries in it. And these flowers had chosen precisely the color of an edible thing, or of a delicate embellishment to an outfit … one of those colors which, because they offer children the reason for their superiority, seem most obviously beautiful to the eyes of children, and for that reason will always seem more vivid and more natural to them[.]

I loved these. It‘s a quick read, but the poems are hard. It‘s wonderful for its tumultuousness—many short but some long. I‘m glad I grabbed this randomly out of a bookstore.

an intellect crosses mother-of-pearl
gates among clouds
forms substances floats
on muddy pools pursuit
of heavenly patterns mate
of birds contemplated
from this earth

A beautiful collection of strange, somber poems from this famous Iranian poet. I love translations because it lets you tap into a culture vastly different from your own. It‘s like traveling in that sense: a significant reminder of how large and varied the world is.

There is a certain brilliance to the understanding that the ideas will come off skewed. And just like traveling, you‘re not getting the full scope. It‘s fun though.

While I‘m not recommending you read this, I will say this book is wild, and I‘m proud of myself for getting through it. Because I‘m over 700 pages in, and still have a ways to go.

I am you, you
and the one who loves
and the one who within herself
suddenly discovers a vague bonding
to a thousand things loaded with unknown
strangeness
and I am all the fierce lust of the earth
that pulls all waters into itself
to make all fields fertile

I loved these abstract poems, encompassing so many subjects, but doing it in a way where I didn‘t have to worry about comprehending it all—even after reading it twice—whether this was intentional on the poet‘s part or not, but I could soak it up without worry, knowing it‘s about America and, judging by the title, about the over-saturation of content—at least partially that—combined with reams of cultural references, contributing to the pile-on.

I can‘t believe I‘m saying this…but this book is awesome.

It went from boring—and I had no idea how I was going to get through it (because it‘s LONG)—to getting good, by around page 250, and now, over 400 pages into it, I‘ve come to think it‘s awesome.

The whole thing is epic. And I still have so far to go, too….

Refuse just once to eat the shit that you‘ve been served up and the powers that be will make sure there‘s a double helping steaming on your plate at every supper for the next eight hundred years.

A fascinating series of fragments on love and lust, relationships, and (interracial) dating.

Sebree fills this book with cultural references—both high and low—for a work that is media obsessed. Entertainment obsessed. Literature obsessed.

It‘s also filled with uncertainty, which I appreciated; doubt and longing and lostness. I‘m a sucker for anti-confidence as well as confidence; this combines them both.

How much of want is need?

How much of fear is why I‘ve been single for five years?

Belief, in Peter‘s private view of things, counted for little. The eternal, insubstantial ideal was the thing…

Incredibly dense yet light simultaneously. I love the line breaks, the many different structures—which helps keep a pretty long book of poetry full of excitement—the questions and proclamations. I found it playful, dead serious, faintly spiritual. I read it twice and could read it a third time, easy. It‘s filled with guesswork and ambiguity so it could really never get old. I also love the tactile feel of this paperback—it‘s lovingly crafted.

I wanted narrative to be a picture of distances ringed
in purple.

Then I wanted it to be electronic fields exempt from
sentiment.

Then I wanted it to be the patient elaboration of my
senses.

Both are mixtures of enigma and proof.

Honeysuckle, elder, moss, followed one another like a
sequence of phrases in a sentence, contributing
successively to an ambience that for the sake of
convenience I will call the present.

One of the best new novels I‘ve read. But one thing: there were moments when I felt nearly every character is a dickhead (jerk), and by the end I was outright laughing at how dumb they were being…. And I still kind of feel like they‘re jerks, though time has chilled me out on this view…I think it‘s pretty much undeniable.

Still though, that doesn‘t stop the book from being killer. And the characters‘ flaws make them human. (Mean though.)

I don‘t mean to be dramatic, but this is just the best book ever. If only they all could be this good.

Reese knows a lot of talented people—half the trans women in Brooklyn live in a state of perpetual pre-celebrity, awaiting a well-deserved recognition that will never come.

“When you get a divorce everyone expects you to provide a story to justify it. Every woman I‘ve ever met who has had a divorce has a story to explain herself. But in real life the story and actual reasons for the divorce diverge. In reality, everything is more ambivalent. My own reasons are closer to a tone than a series of causes and effects. But when I talk about it, I know people want a cause and effect, a clear WHY.”

This was much better on the second read, and much easier to understand. There‘s a thing Márquez does with POV, where he constantly shifts who is narrating, and I found this difficult the first time through. I was obsessed with figuring out the rules for it. But on this second read I could relax and enjoy it without any issues. It‘s about understanding that the voice shifts, which works with the mood. Don‘t overthink it.

Anyway—a masterpiece.

I finished this actually, but I‘m hesitant to leave a real review, as I plan to reread it, and ever since finishing it I‘ve been watching videos of Lisa Robertson giving talks and such.

It doesn‘t help that much of my reading lately has been magazines, which gives me nothing to contribute to this app…. (They‘ve been good mags though! (Autocorrect tried to change that to MAGA!).)

But for now I will say that this book “Boat” is phenomenal.