I’m still not sure if I know how to read poetry. I find poems don’t stick in my head very long, like they blend into my neurons’ background noise after reading them, thinning out until there’s not much left. Like yesterday, less than twelve hours ago, I read Everything Reminds You of Something Else, with a poem about the ringing postman, and laying in bed not getting up, and I knew exactly that feeling and thought I’ll write about that in my review! and then forgot about it entirely until this moment when I was flipping (well, e-flipping, it’s a PDF) through and remembered. So I went from knowing exactly that feeling, a poem with perfect resonance, to, less than a day later, wiped from my mind. Is that me or the poetry? What does it say that the only poems I manage to recall are A.A. Milne’s and Shel Silverstein’s poems for kids?
Unprompted, here is what I remembered from Everything Reminds You of Something Else:
- there is a poem with a guinea pig in it (for eating, not cuddling; they are in Ecuador);
- this quote: writing is compensation for a shortfall of some sort.
Maybe poetry is like air and we breathe it in greedily, use it in our muscles, but then, usefulness exhausted, we breathe out the remains and forget about it?
I think I liked Everything Reminds You of Something Else. There were many >, which make me think of greater than‘s. Indents are cut lines all over the pages. I liked the flow. It seemed consistent. Maybe I should stop requesting to review poetry books, but I like having poetry in my life, even if I don’t know how to speak intelligently about it.
A pigeon in a crack of the Wailing Wall — that was in the poetry book too. See, I can remember some things 🙂
Everything Reminds You of Something Else by Elana Wolff went on sale April 1, 2017.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.