The Book of Goodbyes
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award The Book of Goodbyes speaks to a certain deranged love that throws into question sex, legality, gender-politics, disability, and the end of an affair. The book shifts between lyric and narrative, hyper-realism and magical realism, fact and fiction, and is organized like a play with Act I, Intermission, Act II, and Curtain Call.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Peace makes awful poetry" writes Weise in her second collection, in which goodbyes "begin long before you hear them/ and gain speed." Split into two main sections or acts with Intermission in between and Curtain Call at the end, this is a smart and savvy ode to absences of a lover, of a self, and of a part of the self, literal and figurative. Weise, an amputee, writes brilliantly about being marked as a "disabled poet;" in "Caf Loop," a dialectic between strangers, she writes, "I knew her/ from FSU, back before she was disabled.// I mean she was disabled but she didn't/ write like it." Big Logos, Weise's name for her paramour figure, is "Li Po sometimes/ and Catullus others," making cameos in varying stages of departure: "The thing about him is// he keeps being the thing. You could never/ count on him. I did." Intermission's whimsical, hip fables star anthropomorphic finches, and the Curtain Call's "Elegy for Zahra Baker" a philosophical tract on absence, presence, and pain brilliantly examines the case of a missing person, a young girl with a missing leg. Throughout, Weise's masterfully balanced voice transforms even unique intricacies of her experience into a way to relate to not alienate the reader. This is a brilliant book ultimately about connection.