Let Us Wreathe Them in Laurels

If you missed our interview with Leanne Shapton, now’s the time to catch up: her memoir “Swimming Studies” (Indiebound | Amazon) has just won a National Book Critics Circle Award.

D.A. Powell, who won for “Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys: Poems” (Indiebound | Amazon) is also spectacularly talented, so if you’ve been looking to place a book on your coffee table to demonstrate you are fun and sexy, but also someone who knows about which poets are really good, again, strike while the iron is hot.

No, that’s not how you roll (or is it? great!), so let the last part of “corydon & alexis, redux” (from an earlier collection) wash over you:

guess I figured to be done with desire, if I could write it out
dispense with any evidence, the way one burns a pile of twigs and brush

what was his name? I’d ask myself, that guy with the sideburns and charming smile
the one I hoped that, as from a sip of hemlock, I’d expire with him on my tongue

silly poet, silly man: thought I could master nature like a misguided preacher
as if banishing love is a fix. as if the stars go out when we shut our sleepy eyes

There are some great people writing great things, is the take-home here, and you will never be freed from the tyranny of your desires, ever.