Let's All Die Happy

California is burning, Covid-19 proceeds unchecked, and twin hurricanes are headed to the Gulf of Mexico to hit land next week, so I chose this book for today, for the strange cheer and dark comedy of its title: Let's All Die Happy, by Erin Adair-Hodges (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017). I gasped when I opened the book and read its epigraph by Bruno Schulz, because I had just encountered him that morning while reading An Unnecessary Woman, by Rabih Alameddine! Alignments and coincidences keep happening. I'm sure I'll tell you about more.

Well, here's one: hurricanes. In her poem "Pilgrimage," full of beauty I'll let you discover when you get this book for yourself, I find "goodbyes distinctive / and precious as hurricanes." Speaking of goodbyes, oh, "Seeing Ex-Boyfriends" has such an excellent ending, and here's an excellent title for you: "A Murder of Librarians." Plenty of disasters, including asteroids taking out the dinosaurs in "Natural History," but plenty of joy, too, as when her little son is delighted by that! "His fingers turn claws as the film / starts again and we wait for his favorite part, / the hungry meat, in the sky a coming fire." I needn't mention the coincidence of fire. Sigh...but I did. And in "Rough Math," "I...want your grief / to pour from your eyes like smoke...

But, "Let's all die happy." That's the first line of another poem with a wonderful title, "Everybody in the Car / We Are Leaving without You," which sounds like a familiar threat, and a real invitation. Here I particularly love the hooking up of the Mother and Father of American Poetry:

                                ...Let's set Whitman
     & Dickinson up on a date & watch
     as the awkwardness flames.

Aauggh, flames again! Here's a tender coincidence instead. In a scene I read this morning in the novel, a music box is important in a mother-daughter relationship. It's also part of the mother-daughter relationship in the poem "The Robin Tanka," used as an aural image: "Her voice is a music box / grown tired of being turned." My attentiveness to connection, alignment, and coincidence keeps happening, as does my commitment to this reading of a poetry book a day in August. It has felt like work, but work I love, schoolwork (and I loved school), homework, even, in a weird way, holy work. So, of course, in her poem "The Last Judgment," I find the phrase, "His Holy Homework." This work is getting me through, giving me joy, and I hope giving you some joy, too.

Now let me leave you with a few lines from her poem, "Twelve":

     Though I am not strong
     I want to be. I'm getting worn down
     by the weakness I see.