All posts tagged: Justin Boening

Justin Boening: “How To Live With Almost Nothing – Ed Skoog’s Rough Day“

Published by Staff

Rough Day Ed Skoog Copper Canyon Press, 2013 “Poetry is how to live with almost nothing,” proclaims the speaker of Ed Skoog’s wildly expansive yet personal and grief-filled second book of poetry, Rough Day. And though this idea—the belief that poetry can instruct us on how to live more attentively—may have never been rendered exactly in these terms before, the path it points toward is one we recognize. We see this kind of philosophy acted out by holy people in nearly every religion, such as nuns or monks who practice their faith primarily through abstinence. Skoog’s version of this ascetic character is a secular American one—the poet who needs little more than a book of elegies, fresh mink oil in his boots, and a sign so he might flag down his next interstate ride across the country. But the thinking that drives Skoog’s book forward isn’t always so declamatory or even imagistic. “I’m trying to find where influence end,” the speaker says. This sentence first reads like a typo. “Influence,” of course, is a singular …

2012 Staff Picks: Justin Boening reviews Mark Strand’s Almost Invisible

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Almost Invisible Mark Strand Knopf, 2012 By Justin Boening, Associate Editor for Poetry Northwest 2012 was a remarkable year for poetry. From Eduardo C. Corral’s outstanding debut, Slow Lightning, to Jorie Graham’s finest effort in years, Place, there was much that dazzled, provoked, and inspired. When pressed to make a choice, however, as to which 2012 collection could be called my absolute favorite, I landed firmly on a book of poems not even considered a book of poems by its author: Almost Invisible. Mark Strand’s most recent collection of short prose pieces (as he calls them) has all the trappings of his previous attire—the infamously repetitive diction, the drippy nostalgia, and, of course, that hallmark debonair fatalism. But these poems are far from being placid guff. The poems of Almost Invisible are nimble and tonally varied, smart and introspective—the epitome of Strand’s best late-period work. In an episode of the Poetry Foundation’s podcast Poetry Off the Shelf, Vijay Seshadri says of Strand: “…to some extent all of Strand’s poems are about the situation of the …