I had problems with this book, but I still want to give it four out of five stars. It’s strange. I could give you a list of things about this book that I just didn’t like: there were sentences I read and read and read again and still my brain couldn’t compute what these sentences were trying to say; the narrative voice seemed so distant from the reader, just like in some other books written by poets (I’m talking about you The Sentamentalists); the philosophical interludes do nothing for me; it’s real, so there’s no true resolution because real life is messy and uncomfortable and nothing ever works out the way it should, so in the end, one finishes the book feeling unsatisfied.

But then, while reading it, Geoff and I sat up in bed and tried to remember the names and locations of baseball teams. I haven’t watched baseball in years, since they went on strike in the early 1990s. But I sat in bed and just listed off team after team while Geoff said How do you know all this? Because it’s from my childhood. It isn’t even knowing so much as just thereing: it is there in my brain and I did nothing on purpose to put it there.

Maybe that’s why, for all its faults, I give Bandit four stars. It’s the thereing in Brodak’s brain that comes across in the prose. She didn’t chose this, but it’s all there. One after another, laid out, for the reader. That’s really all I can think of to say, to justify my ranking, because everything else I can think of to say is negative.

I don’t know.

Bandit: A Daughter’s Memoir by Molly Brodak went on sale October 4, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I’m so sad. This book hurts my heart. Mukasonga, sent from Rwanda to Burundi with her brother, chosen to be the ones who survive. What a weight placed upon her. How must one deal with that? Lists of the dead, bodies never found. My daughter watches Pokemon or plays in the yard, unimaginable to her another world where by seven she’s been uprooted, vilified, chased, cowering in fear by the side of the road while soldiers throw grenades in her direction.

You can’t rate a book like this — a book that gives witness, a book that gives a paper grave to Mukasonga’s family, most killed in the Rwandan genocide of 1994, slaughtered after decades of persecution. You can’t say Oh the writing was [adjective] or The imagery was [adjective] or anything that one generally says in a book review. How could you? On a book to document the existence of people whose existence was negated, whose existence was attempted to be erased? And what if you were the one chosen to survive, to keep the memory alive?

…whether after Auschwitz you can go on living — especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living — Theodor Adorno

To go on living. The weight of survival. The weight of the dead.

I’m so sorry.

Cockroaches by Scholastique Mukasonga went on sale October 4, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I am in the process of making friends with a poet. So I decided to read a book of poetry, and figured a Best Of meant that I wouldn’t have to suffer through a bunch of drivel. Of course, now that I’ve written the first two sentences of this review, I’m thinking I should have planned and made it in iambic pentameter or something, which would mean looking up exactly what iambic pentameter is because I think what I think iambic pentametic is (da da da da da da da; da da da da da da da da) may just be a rhythm that children’s books are often written in.

So I don’t read much poetry. I know that I like reading poems that rhyme, but then (I thought quite hard on this) I realized that saying I like reading poems that rhyme really means I like reading When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six by A.A. Milne, because very few poems rhymed in Best American Poetry 2016 and, the ones that did, I didn’t enjoy as much as the ones that didn’t. I read a few poems from the anthology each day, letting them shine on me like equatorial sunshine. That’s what I think good poetry should do, make you feel like one is standing in a southern Italian sun, by the beach but not on the beach, with that white light we don’t get here (too far north). Clarity. To be of pure white light is how I described my daughter; good poetry should be like that.

For the most part, Best American Poetry 2016 was like that. I felt cleansed.

Best American Poetry 2016 edited by Edward Hirsch went on sale September 6, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.