A review by levitybooks
Bough Down by Karen Green
5.0
My #1 (favourite) read of 2020.
Video Review
Karen Green's Frail Sister is my favourite poem of all time. And I see, only now, that its poetic structure was first devised in Bough Down, an elegiac response to David Foster Wallace's death.
The way we talk about death has changed a lot in the last decade. The generation before me find it taboo to discuss causes of death. This is especially true of suicide. I am one of very few people in the world studying suicide, and I suspect this is largely due to its legalization in Canada. It remains illegal in some forms in many parts of the world and that makes it especially hard to talk about. That also makes it hard to understand. The problem then is that it is hard to know how to grieve someone who dies by suicide.
This is why I think Bough Down is beyond being a spectacular poem. It is a uniquely real and close journey through a peculiar occurrence of grief — both in its discovery and its particular subject. Sure, it's undeniable that it serves as an excellent poem in and of itself—were it fictional—with it's surrealist construction and a style rolling with human longing, wit, humour, hope and chaos. But its honesty, humble and raw expression is what set it apart. It takes guts and love to write like this.
Karen Green's Bough Down rivals and contrasts greatly with Anne Carson's Nox. Both are turning the book as an object into a very personal form, a diary you feel you should not have been able to access. And only when this is done can we get close enough to appropriately convey to the closest conscious feelings we could ever write.
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Original Review:
Review coming soon for this fantastically f***ing sad, elegiac masterpiece. I need to gather myself.
Video Review
Karen Green's Frail Sister is my favourite poem of all time. And I see, only now, that its poetic structure was first devised in Bough Down, an elegiac response to David Foster Wallace's death.
The way we talk about death has changed a lot in the last decade. The generation before me find it taboo to discuss causes of death. This is especially true of suicide. I am one of very few people in the world studying suicide, and I suspect this is largely due to its legalization in Canada. It remains illegal in some forms in many parts of the world and that makes it especially hard to talk about. That also makes it hard to understand. The problem then is that it is hard to know how to grieve someone who dies by suicide.
This is why I think Bough Down is beyond being a spectacular poem. It is a uniquely real and close journey through a peculiar occurrence of grief — both in its discovery and its particular subject. Sure, it's undeniable that it serves as an excellent poem in and of itself—were it fictional—with it's surrealist construction and a style rolling with human longing, wit, humour, hope and chaos. But its honesty, humble and raw expression is what set it apart. It takes guts and love to write like this.
Karen Green's Bough Down rivals and contrasts greatly with Anne Carson's Nox. Both are turning the book as an object into a very personal form, a diary you feel you should not have been able to access. And only when this is done can we get close enough to appropriately convey to the closest conscious feelings we could ever write.
-
Original Review:
Review coming soon for this fantastically f***ing sad, elegiac masterpiece. I need to gather myself.