Thane Tierney

FictionHistorical Fiction

The Pretender

Review by Thane Tierney

If you’re the sort of person who hangs on to every morsel of palace drama between Princes Harry and William, if you binge-watched every episode of The Crown twice, if your copy of Burke’s Peerage is dog-eared from overuse, then Jo Harkin’s sophomore novel, The Pretender, should be right up your alley. On the other hand, if you can’t tell a Tudor from a Stuart, if your grasp of British history is limited to 1066, the Magna Carta and James Bond, The Pretender might still be right up your alley. Here’s why.

As we’ve learned from the massive success of Game of Thrones, the public has a virtually unquenchable thirst for watching royal dynasties die nastily. And things aren’t looking good for King Henry VII in 1485, despite his army having slain Richard III; forces are at play both abroad and at home to have his throne usurped by any of a number of pretenders.

The Pretender’s protagonist, introduced to us as John Collan, is one of them. Young John is spirited off from his father’s farm in the company of a mysterious nobleman and a priest, rechristened as Lambert Simons, and told he is the rightful heir to the British throne. What could possibly go wrong? When Lambert inquires whether he will have to take the crown from Henry by violent means, his tutor-priest replies, “Oh no, I’m sure he’ll hand it over full apologetic. . . . Don’t be an ass.”

After his initial schooling in Oxford, Lambert continues on to Burgundy and Ireland, where he is steeped in the intricacies of etiquette and politics in a manner befitting a future monarch. It’s in the latter that he meets—and falls in love with—Joan, the proto-feminist daughter of the Lord Deputy of Ireland. He realizes, to his dismay, that such a match is out of the question, as he could marry her in neither of his two likely futures: king of England or disgraced (and possibly dead) peasant pretender. 

But which of these two fates will befall him? What will become of his beloved? And there’s also the slight matter of England, whose fortune hangs in the balance. Harkin skillfully evokes the foreboding and intrigue that surrounds the throne with rough-hewn language and fistfuls of bawdy humor. Her rollicking saga of royalty, loyalty, lechery and treachery is fit for a king . . . or a man who was merely told he would be one. 

Jo Harkin’s rollicking saga of royalty, loyalty, lechery and treachery, The Pretender, is fit for a king . . . or a man who was merely told he would be one.
FictionPopular FictionComing of Age

Our Beautiful Boys

Review by Thane Tierney

We obviously have good reason to be somewhat skeptical about parents’ biased assertions. How many times have we heard parents say, “But they’re a good kid!” when their little darlings are accused of behaving badly? In Sameer Pandya’s novel Our Beautiful Boys, though, the presumption of innocence seems, at first, eminently plausible. Vikram, Diego and MJ are three high school football players who seem to exemplify the concept of the student athlete. When the three are accused of assaulting a fellow student, their families’ concerns about how they will be treated break along ethnic and economic divides. 

The immediate penalty for the boys is an indefinite suspension until the school principal can figure out the truth of what happened the evening of the assault. As teens do, the boys clam up at first, then try to concoct a unified story that leaves them comparatively blameless. But the football season hangs in the balance, and the team won’t make the playoffs without its three stars, so the pressure is on to get this resolved, and quickly. In their absence, their fellow students begin to segregate into camps supporting or opposing the victim’s account of the events, which is the only version initially made public.

Meanwhile, the parents find themselves in an awkward position, occasionally working at cross-purposes with one another while trying to defend both their kids’ and their families’ reputations. And the high schoolers aren’t the only ones concealing valuable truths: The adults have secrets of their own, which complicates the interactions among all concerned. 

Investigating masculinity, ethnicity, education, privilege and social standing, Pandya has delivered an incisive and thoughtful novel that not only speaks to our contemporary culture, but also unearths some timeless truths about the good—and bad—kids inside us all.

Sameer Pandya’s Our Beautiful Boys is an incisive and thoughtful novel that speaks to contemporary culture and unearths some timeless truths about the good—and bad—kids inside us all.
FictionFamily DramaComing of Age

Red Dog Farm

Review by Thane Tierney

In Nathaniel Ian Miller’s gritty yet tender sophomore novel, Red Dog Farm, Orri is on the horns of a dilemma—or would be, if the cattle he helps raise in the Borgarbyggd region of western Iceland actually had horns. He’s at that awkward crossroads where deciding about higher education, finding your way around relationships and becoming an independent adult all collide. After a term at college in the big city (Reykjavik, population 140,000), Orri returns to the struggling family farm on early “vacation” to lend his father a hand. Pabbi—dad in Icelandic—is said to be suffering from depression, though he is loath to admit it.

While a farmer’s job is by no means easy even in the most fertile of settings, Iceland’s short growing season, frequently inclement weather and scarcely arable volcanic landscape seem almost perversely designed to conspire against a farmer’s success. As Pabbi tells his son, trying to disabuse him of the romance of farming, “It’s not cuddly lambs and horses shaking their manes in the afternoon light. It’s grit and misery.” Undeterred, Orri works alongside, if not exactly with, his father as spring stretches into summer. 

One evening, while trolling the internet for a potential partner for a neighbor, Orri comes across Mihan, a part-time student and fellow fan of a “semi-obscure Kiwi musician.” If the match wasn’t made in heaven—no one would confuse the internet with that—it certainly piques Orri’s fancy. Who wouldn’t be charmed by an online profile that declares, “If you tell me to smile I will stab you in the face.”

So now Orri has two potentially exclusive interests competing for his attention, and, each in their own way, his affection. How he navigates a path toward fulfillment lies at the core of this heartfelt coming-of-age story. 

It’s fitting that Red Dog Farm is being released in France as Dans Nos Pierres et Dans Nos Os (“In Our Stones and in Our Bones”), because that’s exactly where it’s coming from. Miller’s evocative depiction of life in rural Iceland is note-perfect.

A heartfelt coming-of-age story about a son leaving college to help on his father’s farm, Nathaniel Ian Miller’s Red Dog Farm is note-perfect in its evocative depiction of life in rural Iceland.
FictionHistorical FictionCrime Fiction

Saint of the Narrows Street

Review by Thane Tierney

If you’re in Brooklyn and want to grab a slice of pizza, you go to Totonno’s or L&B Spumoni Gardens. If you’re not in Brooklyn and want to grab a slice of life there, reach for William Boyle’s seventh novel, Saint of the Narrows Street.

Though Risa Taverna’s husband, Saverio Franzone, has plenty of friends in the neighborhood, to his wife, Sav is a terror. She knew he was “a bad man” soon after marrying him, and his abuse has increased since the birth of their son, Fabrizio. When Sav comes home drunk one night, starts an argument and waves his newly acquired gun around, Risa clonks him on the head with a frying pan, and he hits his head for the second time on the kitchen table as he falls to the floor. Goodbye, Sav.

It’s probably not a great loss to the world, but it’s an immediate tragedy for Risa and her sister, Giulia, who witnessed the whole thing. Risa and Giulia are basically upstanding citizens who, in a moment of crisis, did what they felt they had to. Hoping to protect Fabrizio from the fallout, the women enlist Sav’s best childhood buddy, Christopher “Chooch” Gardini, to help them dispose of the deceased and make a pact to let sleeping dogs—and husbands—lie.

Over the next 18 years, Sav’s memory rests uneasily, occasionally threatening to upend the carefully guarded alibi. But the resemblance between father and son goes deeper than just the image in the mirror, and Fabrizio, who never knew his dad, inevitably has questions, some of which might best be left unanswered.

Boyle, who grew up in the neighborhood he depicts, has a pointillist’s eye for detail, with every image meticulously crafted in a way that seems effortless. You can smell the cigarette smoke and desperation wafting from the dive bar, the freezer lasagna being reheated when the priest drops by uninvited, the moist earth covering a grave whose secrets can’t be buried nearly deep enough. Fans of Dennis Lehane or George Pelecanos will find Saint of the Narrows Street as authentic and satisfying as Spumoni Garden’s Sicilian pie, but unlike their menu, there’s no hero in sight.

William Boyle has a pointillist’s eye for detail. In Saint of the Narrows Street, you can smell the cigarette smoke and desperation wafting from the dive bar and the freezer lasagna reheated when the priest drops by.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionDebut Fiction

Homeseeking

Review by Thane Tierney

Zhang Suchi and Wang Haiwen, the protagonists of Karissa Chen’s epic debut novel, Homeseeking, have a star-crossed romance that waxes and wanes over decades and continents. Suchi and Haiwen’s story begins when they are children in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during the 1930s; their relationship blossoms into romance in their teens, but is abruptly interrupted in 1947 when Haiwen enlists in Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Army. Suchi and her older sister are then sent to Hong Kong to escape the civil war, in which Mao Zedong’s Communists ultimately prevail. Separated by conflicts both internal and external, Suchi and Haiwen sacrifice their youthful dreams to build parallel, albeit occasionally intersecting, lives.

Homeseeking is primarily a love story, set against some of the most monumental events of modern Asian history. Its narrative hopscotches back and forth across seven decades, until the estranged sweethearts rekindle their relationship in the unlikely locale of a 99 Ranch Market produce section in Los Angeles. But it’s also a political story, tracing the diaspora of post-World War II mainland Chinese who never expected to wind up in Taiwan, or Hong Kong, or America. Finally, it’s a family story, of the ever-present yearning for “people, people who shared the same ghosts as you, of folks long gone, places long disappeared.”

Over a decade in the making, Homeseeking embodies the ambitious scope of James Michener’s historical novels or (while not nearly as long) Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy. Chen’s ability to navigate effortlessly across cultures and eras reflects not only the depth of her research, but also her natural gifts as a storyteller. 

There is one potential stumbling block for a more casual reader: Chen transliterates Chinese words differently under different circumstances. For instance, the character Suchi is also referred to as Suji at different points in the narrative. Chen addresses this in a forward, explaining that her choices reflect different regional pronunciations and romanization styles, and asking readers to empathize with the linguistic challenges her characters, and immigrants across the globe, must navigate. While it may take a few detours to Google to clarify the occasional word or phrase, the book settles into a compelling narrative that fills in most of the blanks contextually. It’s a small price to pay for admittance to such an auspicious debut.

Karissa Chen’s Homeseeking is both a love story and a family story, capturing the ever-present yearning for “people, people who shared the same ghosts as you, of folks long gone, places long disappeared.”
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

The Bishop’s Villa

Review by Thane Tierney

It might seem simple, sitting on the couch with Netflix on and your belly full, to envision the heroics you’d accomplish if war broke out in your homeland: You’d join the armed forces, or whatever constituted the resistance. You’d break the chains of your oppressors, just like Star Wars, or go rogue, living off your wits and aiding the forces of good, just like Mad Max. Of course you would. Of course you would. 

But life isn’t a Hollywood movie, and as the real stories of World War II are lost to living memory, it takes someone with a sharp eye and an emotionally perceptive heart to bring the nuance of enduring an occupation into focus. Italian author Sacha Naspini has done so triumphantly in his second novel to be translated into English, The Bishop’s Villa. Naspini is from Grosseto, a town in southern Tuscany that holds a dubious distinction: It was Europe’s only Catholic diocese to have been rented out by its bishop as a prison camp during the Holocaust. For eight months toward the end of the war in the European theater, the Roccatederighi seminary housed about 100 Jews, many of whom were sent on to Auschwitz. 

The Bishop’s Villa’s fictional protagonist, who stands in for everyman, is a cobbler in Grosseto named René. It’s not his war; he’s just trying to keep his head down and make it through, like most of the townsfolk. But when his friend (and unrequited love) Anna flees to join the resistance, his relationship with her lands him in hot water with the local collaborators, and he finds himself an unwilling “guest” at the bishop’s villa. Though he’s beaten and interrogated, René holds out hope. “What,” he reflects, “can you do to a man who looks at you calmly when you threaten him with death? You can chew his bones clean, but you can’t touch his soul, which means you will never win.”

René’s gut-wrenching story of survival caroms between moments of unexpected kindness and unfathomable cruelty as the final days of the war play out. Naspini is to be commended for helping us to recall a story that played out thousands of times across a continent, a scenario that we dare not forget lest it be repeated. 

Sacha Naspini’s The Bishop’s Villa is a gut-wrenching story of survival set in Grosseto, a Catholic diocese in Tuscany which was rented out by its bishop as a prison camp during the Holocaust.
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Precipice

Review by Thane Tierney

It’s probably manageable if the leader of the free world goes off the deep end, or if the continent that drives the world’s economy loses its collective mind . . . unless both things happen at the same time. In 1914, at the beginning of Robert Harris’ latest novel, Precipice, the stars align to create a war so horrific in its size and scope that it would later (wrongly, as it turned out) be called “the war to end all wars.” Meanwhile, British Prime Minister H.H. Asquith has fallen head over heels for Venetia Stanley, an aristocrat 35 years his junior.

Did we mention he is married?

It should be also said at this juncture that, while Precipice is a work of fiction, virtually all of the characters are real, as is the correspondence from the PM to his inamorata. In fact, the letters (which she saved) provide some of the only historical insight into meetings that determined Britain’s decision to involve itself in the continental conflagration. The lone fictional character, a Scotland Yard Special Branch officer named Paul Deemer, has been tasked with monitoring what, if any, secrets are being spilled in the lovebirds’ copious correspondence (Asquith wrote to Venetia as many as three times a day).

Harris steers the reader through the slalom course of this ill-fated love story, set against the backdrop of the war’s more consequential casualties. His supporting cast, ripped right out of the society pages, includes the ruthlessly ambitious David Lloyd George, who would succeed Asquith as PM; the poet Rupert Brooke, who is enamored of Asquith’s daughter; Winston Churchill, whose hubris led to disaster at Gallipoli; and King Edward VII, who had somewhat scandalously anointed Asquith as PM in Biarritz, France, rather than on British soil.

Harris’ ear for language is keen, capturing both Britain’s elite and hoi polloi with effortless grace. Of course, he is aided by Asquith’s actual words, quoted from one of the avalanche of love letters: “Do you know how much I love you? No? Just try to multiply the stars by the sands.” Certainly more poetic than Charles’ phone calls to Camilla, though every bit as moonstruck.

Despite the fact that anyone acquainted with modern British history already knows the outcome of the story (spoiler alert: we won the war), Harris’ skill keeps the action taut and the reader focused. And the novel echoes a much older bit of classical English political fiction: As Shakespeare said, the fault lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.

Robert Harris’ Precipice dramatizes a real-life scandal: On the eve of World War I, the British prime minister engaged in a national security-jeopardizing love affair.
FictionShort StoriesSatireLiterary Fiction

Rejection

Review by Thane Tierney

Rejection: Somewhere on the continuum between a casual date rebuff and a duo-destroying divorce, we’ve all experienced it. In Rejection, Whiting and O. Henry Award-winning author Tony Tulathimutte raises the experience to an art form. In seven connected stories, he chronicles several characters’ vivid responses to being turned down, or turned away. 

By vivid, I mean frequently TMI-delivering. Colorful descriptions of body parts and the multiple ways they can interact tumble off the page, and if depictions of sadism and ersatz semen (complete with a recipe) are off-putting, you might consider something more PG. On the other hand, if you can roll with the aforementioned, the book is frequently downright hilarious. 

In one story, the protagonist is a cartoonishly hyperactive tech bro, whose latest invention is living room furniture that also functions as workout equipment, allowing the user to crush out 300-pound leg presses. (Unfortunately, his team hasn’t yet worked out the “stinky/soggy upholstery” problem.) In another chapter, Tulathimutte documents a multi-hour consensus meeting in a university’s “queer-friendly vegetarian-friendly 420-friendly co-op,” weaponizing and satirizing political correctness in extremis. 

As one might expect from a graduate of both Stanford and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Tulathimutte has a facility with verbal stunt-piloting that at times borders on the dazzling. Not every writer can pull off a sentence like this one, describing social media as “the give-and-take of giving takes where no one could take what they’d give.” The structure of Rejection is distinctive as well, riddled with group text messages, acronyms and the jargon of those raised with the internet. Pro tip; Boomers and Gen Xers might want to keep a browser tab open to Urban Dictionary for easy reference.  

Right at the end, Tulathimutte throws one last curveball reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges, a little literary Ouroboros that may cause the reader to question the legitimacy of the entire narrative that precedes it. Clever trick, that, in a clever book aimed at clever readers. 

Tony Tulathimutte’s facility with verbal stunt-piloting borders on the dazzling in Rejection, a novel in seven stories that chronicles vivid responses to the experience of being turned down, or turned away.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

There Are Rivers in the Sky

Review by Thane Tierney

Water. Generally, we don’t give it much of a thought. Unless there’s too little . . . or too much. Then it fills our consciousness, saturating our brains with phrases like “atmospheric rivers” and “glacial retreat,” or such devastatingly commonplace words as “drowning” and “drought.”

In Elif Shafak’s spellbinding novel There Are Rivers in the Sky, a single drop of water falls and regenerates and falls again across continents and centuries, here on the head of a learned and cruel Assyrian king, there as a snowflake on the tongue of an impoverished British baby, and yet again as a lifesaving elixir in the possession of a Yazidi grandmother driven into exile by the Islamic State group.

In a fabulist twist, the Booker-shortlisted, bestselling author imbues this recurring molecule with a sense of memory. After a particularly disturbing and graphic passage near the book’s opening, Shafak states her case clearly and succinctly: “Water remembers. It is humans who forget.”

The book opens with King Ashurbanipal in the 640s B.C.E.; then the narrative takes a leap of thousands of years and miles, to Victorian era London. There, a young lad born to an itinerant scavenger is crowned “King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums.” Modeled on real-life Assyriologist George Smith, Arthur rises above his station to become a scholar who, like Ashurbanipal before him, is enchanted by the Epic of Gilgamesh.

From there, the scene shifts to 2014, by the Tigris river in southeastern Turkey. There, Narin, a young Yazidi girl, is preparing for a journey to Iraq with her grandmother so that she can be baptized in a sacred temple. When the girl questions her elder about why they are being forced from their land, the grandmother recounts a brief history of the Yazidi people, concluding that “For us, memory is all we have. If you want to know who you are, you need to learn the stories of your ancestors.”

Shafak seems to be on a mission to prevent us from forgetting, whether it’s the majesty of ancient Mesopotamia, the horrific crimes against humanity perpetrated upon the Yazidis, or the fragile ecosystem of rivers such as the Tigris and the Thames. Like water itself, There Are Rivers in the Sky seeps into the cracks and crevasses of our humanity, unlocking a sense of wonder.

In Elif Shafak’s spellbinding novel There Are Rivers in the Sky, a single drop of water falls and regenerates and falls again across continents and centuries, touching four lives linked by the Epic of Gilgamesh.
FictionLiterary FictionDystopian Fiction

Hum

Review by Thane Tierney

When it comes to dystopian futures, author Helen Phillips hits the American zeitgeist jackpot in her sixth novel, Hum. Cancel culture, job displacement due to AI, government overreach, deteriorating middle class wealth, missing children, declining air quality, bad breakfast cereals . . . the future’s so dark, you gotta wear a miner’s helmet.

In fiction, a trip out into nature almost always ends up with Job-like trials being visited upon the vacationers. Deliverance. 127 Hours. Jurassic Park. Into The Wild. Even Hansel and Gretel, for goodness’ sake. But despite these fictional precedents, when May makes a little extra money by submitting herself as a test subject for a surgical procedure that will disguise her features from the latest iteration of AI recognition software, she decides to take her family on vacation to the very expensive hyper-natural Botanical Garden. May hauls her two kids and her husband off into this Disney-fied paradise, requiring them, for good measure, to leave their phones and other communication devices at home so they can reap the full benefit of the experience.

And reap it they do.

The “hum” of the title is an AI-powered, jack-of-all-trades android, able to fill roles from a dental hygienist to a pop psychotherapist. If there was any question as to whether Phillips has seen 20 minutes into the future, in addition to dispensing whatever wisdom is appropriate to the moment, hums shill commercial products—unless you upgrade to the ad-free tier. Hum is, as dystopias go, reasonably breezy; it’s suitable for a coast-to-coast airline flight or an extended stay on the beach as an antidote to binge-watching the latest season of your favorite TV show. For those just dipping their toes into speculative fiction, the setting is relatable enough to not make you feel like (ahem) a stranger in a strange land.

For those just dipping their toes into speculative fiction, Helen Phillips’ prescient dystopia Hum is relatable enough not to make you feel like a stranger in a strange land.
FictionPopular FictionComing of Age

Humor Me

Review by Thane Tierney

The British poet Philip Larkin once famously opined that parents “fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you.” Protagonist Presley Fry in Cat Shook’s sophomore novel, Humor Me, could find many faults with her alcoholic mother and their toxic relationship. But after suddenly losing her, 20-something Presley is a bit of an emotional wreck. 

On the surface, it would seem that Presley’s well on her way to having it all: After moving from a small town in Georgia to New York City, she’s landed a gig as a production assistant on Gary Madden’s Late Night Show, with a supportive boss and an imminent promotion to talent booker. Like many city-dwelling professionals her age, Presley has a roommate, Izzy, who acts by turns as agony aunt and partner in crime. 

Much like the women of Sex and the City—she identifies as a Miranda—Presley breezes through a frothy sequence of confusing connections with near-boyfriends, drinks with gal pals at local nightspots and career-enhancing forays into the lower rungs of the entertainment industry, where she hopes to discover the unpolished gem upon whom she can hitch her own star. But the specter of her late mother haunts her at every step. 

And Presley is not the only one mourning her mother’s death. Susan Clark, her mother’s childhood best friend, is also working through her grief, with a side of distress over her wealthy and influential husband having been named in a #MeToo-era sexual misconduct scandal. After a couple of semi-awkward interactions (which seem to be the only type of interaction Presley has), Susan asks to be friends, and Presley somewhat reluctantly accepts. The relationship turns out to be fortuitous for both of them: Susan gets to spoil the daughter she never had, and Presley gains some valuable insight into her mother’s formative years. 

Though it certainly has rom-com-esque appeal, Humor Me goes beyond that, navigating the complexities of breaking old patterns, forging new connections and establishing one’s identity. It’s also a bit of a love letter to the City That Never Sleeps, even if its inhabitants do, occasionally to their detriment . . . and sometimes to their delight.

Like the women of Sex and the City, Humor Me’s protagonist Presley Fry breezes through connections with near-boyfriends, drinks with gal pals and career-enhancing forays in NYC, but the specter of her late mother haunts her at every step.
FictionLiterary FictionFamily Saga

Real Americans

Review by Thane Tierney

It’s the mid-1960s, right at the start of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, and the Red Guards are methodically upending—many would say demolishing—the cultural heritage of China. Books are burned, artifacts are smashed, history is erased. But two plucky biology students, Mei and Peng, are determined to rescue a lotus seed from the university library. 

This isn’t just any seed. It is a seed from thousands of years ago, allegedly dropped from the sky by a dragon as a gift for a long-ago emperor, with the power to confer a wish on its recipient.  But the emperor died before getting to make that wish. Mei, a scientist by nature, is skeptical of the legend, but she wants to protect the seed from the Red Guards, so she takes it.

Here, Rachel Khong’s multigenerational saga Real Americans splits into three narratives, following Mei, her daughter and her grandson through 60-odd tumultuous years after she immigrates to America. The narration isn’t linear; Mei, who plays the pivotal role at the book’s brief outset, largely recedes into the background until the final third of the book, when, as an elderly retired geneticist, she reflects on her life choices and how they have affected her family: “Aren’t we lucky? Our DNA encodes for innumerable possible people, and yet it’s you and I who are here. . . . In this place, on this small blue rock, innumerable miracles: redwoods, computers, stingrays, pianos, you and me.” 

Through intervening events and discoveries, Khong implicitly asks a very pertinent question: What does it mean to be a “real American”? Is it enough to be born in the U.S.? Can you assimilate from a foreign country, a foreign culture? Is there something in our genetics that binds us inevitably to the lands of our ancestral origins? Real Americans’ answers are at once complex and compelling, as science and philosophy sit cheek by jowl with history and elements of magic. As the three narrative strands merge, their denouement is unexpected yet perhaps predestined: the fruit of a seed planted long ago. 

In Rachel Khong’s multigenerational saga, Real Americans, science and philosophy sit cheek by jowl with history and elements of magic.
FictionPoetry

Modern Poetry

Review by Thane Tierney

For a collection titled Modern Poetry, the latest offering from Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Diane Seuss spends a fair amount of time communing with the past.

In the title poem, named after a textbook she studied in college, she reminisces about how she and her roommate referred to William Carlos Williams as “Billy C. Billygoat,” and how she managed to fake her way to an A on a paper about Wallace Stevens despite “having no clue / what he meant by ‘The deer and the dachshund are one.’” That fake-it-till-you-make-it approach has apparently served her well, because she has not only become a highly regarded poet, but also gone on to a two-decade-plus career teaching poetry to other young people with impostor syndrome.

While the spirit of the avowedly modern ‘60s poet Frank O’Hara hovered over her last collection, 2021’s frank: sonnets, which won her the Pulitzer, her guiding star for this outing is a poet who is decidedly not modern: John Keats. In fact, the final poem of the volume, “Romantic Poet,” is at once an homage to Keats and a comment on the contemporary tension between loving an artist’s work and having mixed feelings—or outright disdain—for the artist. After being told the many reasons she would not have liked the unnamed “him” at the poem’s outset, she rejoins with a simple “But the nightingale, I said.”

Ah, the nightingale, the bird that sings. Seuss’ song is not the A-B-A-B rhyme scheme that was pounded into our middle school heads. It’s more subtle, and evinces itself when read out loud. “Rhyme,” Seuss said at 2023’s Great Lakes Poetry Festival, “can just do a thing that nothing else can do; it appeals to our bodies, not our minds.”

In “Romantic Poetry,” Seuss writes, “I was twenty three when I sold off / Modern Poetry and sailed to Italy, seeking / Romantic poetry . . . and found my way to Rome, / and Keats’s death room. / His deathbed, a facsimile.” Feel it, in your body, as you read it? Twenty three, Italy, poetry, facsimile. It’s all there for the taking. To co-opt the famed slogan from the unsung McCann-Erickson ad agency poet who created it for milk, “Modern Poetry: it does a body good.”

In Modern Poetry, Diane Seuss reminisces on faking it through poetry classes in college and on the complicated legacy of John Keats.

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