Zach Williams - 'Beautiful Days'
A visceral short-story collection by a promising debut author.
I have not read Michele Glazer’s poetry before, so getting into this short poetry book was a little adventure.
We’d get into it. After a while, a week, we’d get over it. I’ll be careful next time not to ask she’d say. If some day we would feel stiffened small for resenting her
Poetry is knowledge of heft as it pertains to value. People tend to say ‘Poets are the best in treating words the way they ought to be treated’, but this is not a golden rule in any sense.
Glazer does care for her words. This book is, to me, about nature and fauna. And repetition, somewhat.
Stranger what the hagfish. what drags up the hagfish now & how the man says don’t touch the hagfish —but time’s slippery & into the tank of tangled hagfish the keeper reaches—in past the elbow, a shoved-up sleeve blushing with the water wicking up —it’s benign outside. by outside I mean to leave the building with you & enter into a spring day I’m asking you to imagine the rhododendrons, the iris, mock orange in bloom, soft air, & because the danger is not visible time turns to hagfish, jawless & eyeless (where do I go with this?) often I resist directness because direct mis-seizes a thing & stuns it to silence.
It all reminds me of Robert Hass’s Summer Snow, a far more hoity-toity poetry collection than this. They both hang on to the same sensations of summer, though, and there’s nothing wrong in that.
This is a collection of poetry that appeals to the senses. It irritate me, prickled me, and also turns out quite OK. And that’s it.
I’m left with few memories from the book, which is sad; I wish that I’d at least been left with anger, sorrow, gladness, or anything more than a strong feeling that this book could somehow have been improved. I can’t say why, which means that I am, too, in need of improvement.
