A Handbook of Disappointed Fate

Boyer might be best known as a poet, but her prose is also a joy. All the pieces here are both formally elegant but have intense connections to daily llife. I really liked the ones about Kansas, as i've never been there. Some pieces touch on big issues to do with women's lives, with working lives, but there's always a point of entry for the reader.

* I bought on the Ugly Duckling Presse’s website*One of the most vital reads of 2018. I believe Anne Boyer is one of America’s greatest thinkers and it’s a shame more readers don’t know that.

Part poetry, part philosophy, part pure alphabetic joy. What a great read this is!

“What surveils us says it knows us better than we know ourselves. And what everyone knows surveillance knows about us is that we don’t look very interesting. If there were some form of totality leak, and all of humanity were presented in the form of data before us it would be a laundry list of “sad” punctuated by accidental nefariousness. Tech-gaze delimits our species as fragile at best, brute at worst, and venal at the most predictable. A news feed having noticed an interest in cats, selects headlines about tortured kittens.”A compilation of essays and short, creative non-fiction pieces from poet Anne Boyer taken from over a decade of her prose; some are gossamer-like in their insubstantiality, others seep into the consciousness with unexpected force. Boyer can be infuriatingly oblique, irritatingly overblown, annoyingly aphoristic but she can also be insightful, charming, playful, ferocious and powerful. Here she covers a plethora of topics: the role of poetry in rejecting and refusing to be contained or cowed by oppressive forces; music from Bo Diddley to Mary J. Blige; Kansas City as ‘killer city’, the role of Occupy; racism, feminism and capitalism; and in between aspects of her own life, her projects and her recent treatments for breast cancer. In writing about what she refuses or what enrages or strikes or preoccupies her, she draws on sources that range from Colette, Pat Parker and Brecht, Marx, Nietzsche to Breton and Stendhal.As with any collection this is slightly uneven, some pieces - particularly the essays related to illness - were excellent, some less so.Note: If you want to sample her writing then you can find a selection of her poetry online at the Poetry Foundation site; and it's worth searching for her New Yorker article 'What Cancer takes away'.

I liked the first essay about saying no. I found the other writing bleak and unrelenting, which is how the author seemed to feel about being a poet with cancer. I liked the cover and illustrations. I admire the author's tenacity. But this book was not for me. I bought based on a review in Frieze magazine. Rather expensive for a book I feel unable to give to anyone I know to read. I read to the end in solidarity with the book's struggle but found no further insights or hope to reward me.