Often illuminating and occasionally impenetrable.
A prizewinning poet confronts the challenges of creative nonfiction and the struggles of his career in a collection of high-concept, densely packed essays.
Both the title and the concept require explanation. As Blanchfield (A Several World, 2014, etc.) explains in the opening “Note,” “a proxy in one sense is a position: a stand-in, an agent, an avatar, a functionary.” It might provide an approximation of an identity, as many of these essays that verge on memoir do, yet it is never exactly the same thing. The essays also offer approximations of sorts, as the author appropriates the concepts and words of others, sometimes in paraphrase, sometimes in direct quote—though he acknowledges, “I decided on a total suppression of recourse to other authoritative sources. I wrote these essays with the internet off.” In other words, he wrote from memory, another dimension of identity, and only afterward checked what he had written against the sources, resulting in a final section titled “Correction,” which, at 20 pages, is longer than any of the essays. Following each essay title is the same subhead, “Permitting Shame, Error and Guilt, Myself the Single Source.” Since the author organizes the essays in the order written, loosely following a chronological progression through his life, he suggests, “whatever development can be tracked may correspond to what might be called a self. They are not the same thing. This is a book braver than I am.” Blanchfield describes himself as “a poet’s poet” who has cobbled together a living through adjunct and visiting poet teaching assignments. His homosexuality caused a rift with his fundamentalist mother, with whom he had been very close, and the broken marriage that bore him had him take a new surname (and identity?) when his stepfather adopted him. He writes plenty about his sexual proclivities and relationships, including the longest and latest one with a former student, but even more about the essence of poetry and the relationship between writer and reader.
Often illuminating and occasionally impenetrable.Pub Date: April 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-937658-45-8
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Nightboat Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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