As of today, March 26, 2021, I no longer know how to write a poem. I have no idea how I wrote the poems in this book.
In some ways, this state of unknowing is exciting. A poetry teacher of mine once said, quoting the poet Muriel Rukeyser, “You need only be a scarecrow for poems to land on.” Perhaps, then, my amnesia as to how I made these poems indicates that I’ve been, at times, a scarecrow: a landing place, a vessel, a channel for poems. I like that. To me, it seems preferable to be a channel than what I usually am: a self-will-er, a scrambler, a filler of holes, a looker in “glittery shitdoors” for love (as I note in the poem “Man’s Search for Meaning”).
Reading is not a beachy activity. Reading is for armchairs and bay windows and loverless beds. Bring a book to the beach and you’re agreeing to ruin the book. No matter how careful you are, sand will stuff the creases between the pages—seven years after a beach trip during grad school, I still find sand in my copy of Delmore Schwartz’s collected poems. As a teenager, I vacationed in Jamaica with my dad’s family during the school year and brought Candide—homework—to read on the beach. I fell asleep 10 pages in and woke up as flaky as fish food, my skin road-flare red save for the pale, book-shaped mark on my chest. Was the sunburn the book’s fault or my fault for failing to apply sunscreen, intent on earning my first-ever tan?
It was the fault of the book.
I don’t think of myself as a Luddite; I’ve tolerated Zoom calls and e-books decently well during the pandemic, and I navigate Facebook and Twitter about as well as the average online citizen. It’ll do, in a pinch. But the pandemic has made me feel the pinching. It kept stoking an urge for a more tactile book experience.
To call the warning “early” is generous. It usually arrives between a few seconds and less than a minute ahead of the quake—advance notice that, in duration, is somewhere between a sneeze and a red light. The Achilles’ heel of the system is what its designers call the “blind zone.” Those who might benefit the most from a warning—the people at the epicenter—won’t get one, because the S waves arrive too soon. Still, if you’re far enough outside that bull’s-eye, a few moments can be meaningful. In the past few decades, more than half of earthquake injuries in the U.S. have been caused by people or things falling—two occurrences easily avoided if you have time to take cover beneath a sturdy piece of furniture. For those who are landing planes, assembling electronics, operating cranes, or drilling into molars, even the smallest warning would be welcome. You might have just enough time to lock the wheels on your wheelchair, or to remove your scalpel from your patient’s chest. The effectiveness of the warning depends on how much can be done in a handful of seconds. The goal of E.E.W., therefore, isn’t just to sound the alarm. It’s to help transform knowledge into action as quickly as possible.
Perhaps innovation does not come naturally. Most of us do things the way we see others doing them, the way they’ve always been done. The idea of a frustrated person becoming an inventor as they silently scream, “There must be a better way!” has become a cliché. Maybe that cliché is scarcer than we think.
For the vast majority of not-yet-21-year-olds, the 21st birthday holds a mythical allure, the promise of legal alcohol and long nights spent with friends at the bar. Sure, most newly minted adults can’t afford to move out of their parents’ home, get married, or even graduate college without crippling student loan debt, but in many ways, the 21st brings with it the type of life-altering opportunities that other major birthdays simply don’t, however hard they try. (Sorry, sweet 16s.)
That is, of course, for folks who didn’t have the misfortune of spending their 21st in quarantine during the first waves of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. Those who did experienced a much different milestone, one forged awkwardly at the intersection of living through your first plague, often at home with parents or other family members, while awaiting the joys of graduating into an economic crisis from which the recovery is skewed toward billionaires and corporations. To put it simply, for those who turned 21 in the past year and a half, 21st birthdays just didn’t feel like 21st birthdays.
THE MOST SURPRISING thing about The Vixen, Francine Prose’s historical novel about the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, is how laugh-aloud funny it is. Prose manages to interpose her narrative of that terrifying night in June 1953, when news of the execution interrupted television programming, with an episode of I Love Lucy, so that the two Ethels — Mertz and Rosenberg — become entwined in a sort of madcap symphony of pathos. It is a testament to Prose’s mastery as a storyteller that what emerges is a penetrating look at the underside of comedy — namely, how the human condition can be so predictably cruel and paranoid.
And yet, this is also a book steeped in the warmth of Jewish family life, post–World War II. We learn about the Rosenbergs through the eyes of a feckless young Harvard graduate named Simon Putnam, whose life is built on a series of lies, starting with his name. “Putnam” was bestowed on his grandfather by an immigration official on Thanksgiving as a joke in honor of the holiday, when he was given the goyishe surname of a Mayflower pilgrim. In other words, assimilation is at its peak in America just as everyone is presumed to be a commie sympathizer and the two-martini lunch is in vogue.
Isaka isn't trying to express some grand cultural idea. He wants to give us the irresponsible pleasure of sheer entertainment. And he does. At once outlandish and virtuoso, Bullet Train is like one of those dazzling balance beam routines that keep you hoping the gymnast will stick the landing.
Edge Case is a wonderful novel, smart but not showy, emotional but not sentimental. It asks us to examine a broken society that most of us have helped create, either by our actions or our apathy, and to consider what we'd do when someone we loved has changed irrevocably.
Small Joys of Real Life is an easy, pleasurable read with surprising depth. There is doom in this life, more than we possibly realise, but there is also promise and hope; not just in new life that grows within us, but in our little moments of living, breathing joy even as we stare down the barrel of certain, unpredictable death.