Between You and These Bones was the best poetry book I read in June. I felt the need to open with this because Between You and These Bones’ own opening letter is so bad I had to comment on it and I didn’t want you seeing how much I hated the opening letter and walked away thinking I hated this book. It just happens to have a very bad opening letter, that is enough to scare me away if I hadn’t decided to read the whole book anyway to discover how bad it was as a reviewer. It was more of a surprise how good the book was as I continued to read anyway.
The opening letter immediately leads with bad punctuation with an immediate defense of her book ” The thing about being called a poet is that you can do fiendishly outrageous things and call it art”. She says this because she acknowledges that this is a bad opening to a book. I think the opening letter is meant to display something like “This isn’t your grandmother’s poetry book” to appeal to all the women who are tired of all the grandmother poetry books, this is a poetry book with edge and harshness and doesn’t care. It’s like a bag of chips calling itself extreme- we know its just a bag of chips and while there are extreme bags of chips we know that this bag of chips isn’t that.
All of my notes I took when reading from this point on is me being slowly won over by the author. She has a good content structure, table of contents, and every poem is easy to return to after reading- which is something you would think would be standard but the modern contemporary poetry world seems to be against these conventions. More than it’s structure, it is a book about love making, family, religious undertones, and good art. You start to understand her as a person, right down to how much she likes her boy friend’s hair. She reminds me an awful lot of women I have known who weren’t as clever as they thought they were, but it was so nice to be reminded of them.
I also seemed to find a running theme of relapse and toward the end there is a mention of pain pills. I’m not sure what was really going on with this but if you are the right type of person this might relate to you.
While I said this was the best book I read in June, I do think this book is about average for what I want a poetry book to be at a base level- that being said poetry is compared to other poetry and not what I want the poetry to be. When a C+ student gets his grade curved to an A, the student still knows they got a C+ regardless of the grade. That said, I’d have to give it a curved A.
One side note there were a lot of pages in the book that were almost entirely empty. I think this was meant to help give the few lines on the page more dramatic purpose but it lends itself in a way of having the author feel less clever then she thinks she is feeling. Its charm relies on the fact I enjoy women who are like this, and not in the poetic convention.
