Posts Tagged ‘Graywolf Press’

Chronic

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

by D.A. Powell
Graywolf Press 2009
Reviewed by James Cihlar

 
9

“I did not comprehend desire as a deadly force until –”

powell cover

Chronic speaks to the obsessions of the imagination, the intellect, and the heart, as well as to the modern “deranging” of the landscape and the body. Eschewing the conventional prologue poem, Powell structures the book in two sections, the title poem framed in the center, followed by a coda of two linked poems. With medical valences apparent (underscored by a torso X-ray in place of a traditional author photo on the jacket flap), he names the first section “Initial C,” referencing the first letter of Chronic, and the last section “Terminal C,” the word’s last letter. Together they form a twisted set of parentheses, framing the idea of the self in the eternal present, but revealing that despite the power and immediacy of the here and now, it is simply a piece of something larger, a fragment or intrusion into a longer sentence or composition. Faced with the finite nature of life and the fickle nature of inspiration, given over to the needs and rewards of the body, where do we root our hopes for permanence? Powell considers mortality and eternity; he considers the limits of the individual and the ego alongside the limits of existence on a planet that humans are guilty of infecting:

and always, the sandbars eroding at the periphery
where freshwater meets saltwater, and sawgrass swamp
drains into estuaries and bay.       and always the balance

upset, as herbicides eradicate cat’s claw vine
which has choked out carrotwood, which has displaced cypress
and the sea absorbs the toxins and eliminated matter

what does it matter now, what is self, what is I, who gets to speak
or who does not speak, whether the poems get written
whether the reader receives them whole, in part or not at all

(from “cancer inside a little sea”)

Breathtakingly frank and dark, lyrically beautiful and passionate, Chronic attains wisdom while resisting false consolation.

Powell follows through on the conceit of his title and structure by tweaking readers’ expectations in visual and concrete ways. In “early havoc,” a poem recalling youthful inclinations to the theater, opening quotation marks signal the beginning of speech – but no closing marks follow, and the sentence redirects due to faulty memory. Known for his expansive lines, Powell pushes the physical constraints of the book by including a foldout poem appropriately titled “centerfold.” Distracted by the innovation, a reader might be tempted to dismiss the content as secondary, but in fact the poem is an eerie reminiscence occasioned by a magazine photo of an AIDS protest. Conjuring the promiscuity of youth with vivid imagery, including “on the steps of city hall at the yearly die-in: he was a body . . . you heaved upon like amphibious d-day craft quitting the ocean,” Powell infuses his lines with genuine, understated regret. The flip side, “cinemascope,” contains brackets and cross-outs. Turning to the committed and somewhat stifling domesticity of age, the poem ends with an echo of the biography of Sylvia Plath. It is a powerful statement on the guilt of surviving: “nearly everyone else, pissed off passed away / past and past and past.” Far beyond gimmickry and cheekiness, these subversions of convention support the underlying curse/hope of this book: What if the unexpected happens? What if the world surprises our imaginations?

In part, this has already happened, as indicated by the beautiful love poem “continental divide.” At the middle of life, with youthful indiscretions a distant memory overlaid by years of loneliness, the poet offers a moving, measured praise of love. Several poems explore love as a resolution to the book’s thematic questions of temporality and eternity. In signaling a relationship in trouble with the opening poem, “no picnic,” Powell sounds the themes of artistic manipulation and the fallibility of memory. In “gospel on the dial, with intermittent static,” the lovers shelter from the rain in a cavity caused by lightning in a sequoia’s trunk, mirroring in miniature the emblem of the book’s title and structure: if it is temporary, there is still peace. In “coit tower & us,” Powell seems to say our memory of comfort is permanent, even if the experience of it is not. The demands of illness and the body, the essentially solipsistic nature of pain, may be what drive a relationship to its end, “that night in the foxhole with the pfc” suggests, a theme repeated in a later poem, “scenes from the trip we didn’t take to the antarctic”:

say it with me, sunshine: today, brainscan; today, x-ray
today, complete metabolic panel with platelet differential
today, urinalysis; today, liver biopsy; today, preparing the body

at the last station, the sepulcher was empty and you asked why
beyond this numbing terrain, frozen white cell: phantom laughter
didn’t you hear it all along?     or did you think it was just the wind

But “even the business of dying must be set aside occasionally,” Powell says in “meditating upon the meaning of the line ‘clams on the halfshell and rollerskates’ in the song good times by chic,” reasserting memory’s dominance over pain in some stern self-talk: “go away, you bitter cuss.     it’s still 1980 somewhere, some corner of your dark apartment / where the mystery of the lyric hasn’t faded.     and love is in the chorus waiting to be born.”

Although now it may seem commonplace for poets to incorporate popular references from commercial culture into serious work, Powell helped to pioneer this approach, and remains its best practitioner. In “confessions of a teenage drama queen,” he seems to refute his critics who have called him confessional in a hilarious string of B-movie titles and clichés. With endless source material, the challenge of writing such a poem is to be selective, and Powell has the best ear in the business:

I was a male war bride.     I was a spy
so I married an axe murderer.     I married joan
I married a monster from outer space

I am guilty, I am the cheese, I am a fugitive from a chain gang
maybe I’ll come home in the spring.     I’ll cry tomorrow.
whose life is it anyway?     it’s a wonderful life.

[...]

I was a burlesque queen, I was a teenage zombie
I was an adventuress, I was a convict, I was a criminal
I did it, I killed that man, murder is my beat, I confess

The poem also serves as a warning, forbidding too much autobiographical interpretation of the work. In a poem published in a recent issue of Poetry, Powell offers lines that may shed light on his creative process, in the persona of a student addressing a master:

I have never written a true poem, it seems. Snatches
of my salacious dreams, sandwiched together all afternoon
at my desk, awaiting the dark visitation of The Word.

In contrast to the experimental poems included in Chronic are poems written in traditional form, such as terza rima for “come live with me and be my love,” and a hybrid of the English and Italian sonnet with “coal of this unquickened world.” In fact, classical mythology informs the structure of Chronic, providing rich counterpoint to the poet’s innovation. If a thread running through this book is the relationship of an older and younger man, it draws meaning from the tale of Corydon and Alexis. Powell further bookends the work by beginning with an epigraph from Virgil, and ending with a coda of two poems titled after these figures.

In Virgil’s story, the unrequited desire Corydon feels for Alexis transports him from the literal world to a fantasy realm of the imagination, where he engages in a dialogue of his own making. Finding that he loves the figment of Alexis more than the real person, and struggling to fit his emotions into his pastoral setting, Corydon awakes from his dream and upbraids himself. Doubting that the music he has created is appreciated, he attempts to express his desire in sanctioned ways by using an image of Pan’s pipes as a metaphor for coupling. Powell playfully echoes this image in the racy poem, “lipsync [with a nod to lipps, inc.]”

However, all Corydon’s attempts to find other paradigms that will fit his desire into his surroundings achieve only ambiguous results, with the implication that the effort continues beyond the story. This myth is a powerful engine that fuels Powell’s thematic explorations of temporality, mortality, and eternity; desire, art, and impermanence; and artistic ego, self-doubt, and the creative process. In the book’s final line, he encapsulates the abiding questions that result: “as if banishing love is a fix.    as if the stars go out when we shut our sleepy eyes.”

If the pastoral world order did not allow Corydon’s desire to find justification, in Powell’s book the adversary is the suburbanization of the California landscape. In “republic,” he comments that the processed land of industry and agriculture removed some of the causes of catastrophic illnesses such as malaria and typhoid, and yet clearly the chronic illnesses we have inherited in their place are a result. Placing the relatively feeble yet enduring activity of creating art in stark contrast to the poisoning of our world and our bodies, Powell steers clear of conventional consolation:

you want me to tell you the marvels of invention? that we persevere
that the time of flourishing is at hand? I should like to think it

meanwhile, where have I put the notebook on which I was scribbling

it began like:

            “the smell of droppings and that narrow country road . . .”

Powell has said that the photo on the cover of Chronic shows river waste from a paper mill. At first glance it appears cellular, as if we are seeing a sample under a microscope. Upon closer inspection, we see the indicators of scale and human habitation, including a tiny building and power line in a lower corner. This seems a fitting emblem for the crux of human issues so masterfully covered in this book, the easy transport from macro to micro and back that Powell achieves.

*

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The Bride of E

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

by Mary Jo Bang
Graywolf Press 2009
Reviewed by James Cihlar

7

“There is wreckage. / There is reiteration.”

bang bride of e coverOften in her previous books, Mary Jo Bang used a variety of formal structures to organize metaphysical exploration, including the character pieces of Louise in Love, the ekphrastic verse of The Eye Like a Strange Balloon, and, most effectively, her thorough sounding of the poetic tradition of mourning in Elegy. Of course, the latter book also gave expression to her very real grief over the loss of her adult son. A rigorous philosophical workout, Elegy is remarkable for its discipline, focus, and lucidity. Ransacking the familiar sources of consolation and finding them wanting, the poet goes for several punishing rounds before staring down fate, emerging two-fisted and disillusioned. In her latest book, The Bride of E, the organizing principle is the alphabet, and the results, predictably diffuse, nevertheless contain some rewards.

In the spirit of dictionary entries, these poems provide lists, catalogs, of associations that benefit from the implied narrative of sequential order. Often composed of short, declarative sentences, they take sideways turns, resulting in staccato bursts of stories that seem to revise themselves as they progress. The result is a layering of fragments, an overwriting of the surface, as if one is looking at a wall with scraps of wallpaper of successive vintages showing through.

This approach suits Bang’s exploration of the metaphysics of time, as she illustrates in “The Wake Was a Line and We Watched”: “the nature of looking / at the future while married to the moment.” Collaged fragments mimic time’s operation, with one minute overwritten by the next:

Time-like layers

Of the sheerest substance stacked one atop the other
And finally forming a substrate
Never quite solidifying but after the fact forming a z

(“Z Stands for Zero Hour”)

This revisionist nature enhances our perception of the insecurity of the persona, and her honest unreliability:

It’s April again. It’s October,
That’s what I said.
It’s over, like a ghost in the going to go

(“Outnumbered at 0”)

“There is wreckage. / There is reiteration.” Evoking palimpsests or automatic writing, the fragments of The Bride of E also return to the same obsessive concerns. “Let’s take the wiring apart and see how it works” from “D Is Dying, As One Going in the Dark,” recurs in “For the Final Report” as “I would take the wiring apart / And see how it works.” Bang acknowledges the once-removed aspect of phenomenology: we are capable of examining the history of knowledge, the tropes and conceits that attempt to phrase philosophical concepts, but incapable of coming face to face with those philosophical concepts:

This is the world
When it is reduced down to a moment.

The mind doesn’t halt but goes halfway up
In the elevator and then finds itself stuck.
This is the entirety. Eternity. Made of a material
That is unlikely to change but is forever.

(“F Is for Forgetting”)

The time necessary to understand experience is longer than the experience itself, so the problem must lie in the engine of the human brain, “the gray one” (“For the Final Report”), whose default position is fear:

Terror of being. That mysterious conceptual nothing.
A worn electrical wire connects all the lights.
They go and you say, Good,
That little irritating suspense is over.

The hollowing wait. The stupid puncture of rejection
That, in the moment, wears a human face.

(“O Is in Outside”)

If dialectic is the standard method of philosophical interrogation, the mind’s ability to make distinctions is key. But this leads to separation, alienation, and detachment: “now you’ve divided yourself / From yourself. Now you’re something simple.” (“H Is Here Is a Song, Now Sing”)

What results from division is a gap, the difference between the self and the world, one moment and the next, with the challenge to “negotiate the question of the space / Between the two.” (“P Equals Pie”) This daunting task is perhaps not accomplishable through simple determination applied to a rigorous progressive program. Instead, we encounter meaning through accident, through slips of the tongue: “The sea of the present kept meeting / The vast.” (“Heretofore Having in Mind”) This is true in the prose pieces of the short second section: “I’m tied. I mean tired.”; “And now a scar. Okay, a car.”

Any poetic method is only as good as the lines that result, and in poems such as “W Is for Whatever” and “U Is for United,” we see the rewards:

May I please have a short-term loan
Of agate to build a house against thunder and thirst.
Yes, I know, the gold star is tarnish in the cap
On the coffin lid. An oil-spin iridescence

Catches the dying light. “Sorry,” says Cerberus,
Each mouth moving in unison.

Vestiges of literary and popular culture — Alice in Wonderland, James Joyce, Little Orphan Annie, Six Feet Under, Fargo — mingle with Mao Zedong, Max Beckmann, and Alexis de Tocqueville in The Bride of E. With obvious and slant rhymes at end stops, and consonance and onomatopoeia sprinkled liberally throughout, some poems read as demented nursery rhymes. But the short staccato lines, repetition, and interrupted trajectories create an effect opposite to the expansive ambition of the content itself. In this loose abecedarius, readers might understandably hunger for the open-ended luxuriance of D.A. Powell rather than the insularity of John Ashbery, the latter seeming to influence this volume more. But perhaps most of all, remembering the power and focus of Elegy, with its amazing ability to connect with readers and provide clarity to anguish, we may be disappointed by the occasional solipsism and obfuscation of these lines, resulting in a sense that this volume, an accomplishment in its own right, may appear premature and incomplete when seen in the poet’s oeuvre.

Drawing on personal history, the second section’s prose pieces suggest that a more generative mining of meaning is possible, including this acute description of depression: “Every day would be the same. Waking on the dot to that repeated realization. The crosshairs of a hidden life.” (“G Is for Going”) Revelations also dot the narratives here, increasing their power, including an apparent act of child abuse by an aunt’s boyfriend: “And I’m left with him. I’m six. He says do you want to sit in my car. I never say. We sit side by side on the seat. I look at the dash. I leave myself somewhere else.” (“G Is for Going”) These pieces hint at a new approach to come from this signature poet.

*

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Elegy

Monday, January 21st, 2008

by Mary Jo Bang
Graywolf Press 2007
Reviewed by John Deming

8_5

“Goodnight. I will see you // Tomorrow.  I know I will.”

bang coverSometimes an elegy arrives with such force, it starts to feel like an individual poet can only have one tremendous elegy in them. Or one great person they’re capable of elegizing properly, a person capable of making the poet wrench in silence that there is no proper way to live in a world where this person has died. That’s not to imply that the poet doesn’t care as deeply about someone else: only that the transformation it causes and knowledge it yields means the elegy can probably only be written once.

Maybe. If so, Mary Jo Bang’s Elegy for her son Michael Donner Van Hook accomplishes this. Bang avoids the trap of simply narrating her own grief, and instead lays a crying, nightmarish, high-minded and elastic tribute beside the deceased. The poem “You Were You Are Elegy” makes her son her best and most important elegy. The world doesn’t exist without him:

I’ve been crying. I think you
Have forgiven me. You keep
Putting your hand on my shoulder
When I’m crying.
Thank you for that. And
For the ineffable sense
Of continuance. You were. You are

The narrator in Elegy is plenty grief-stricken, and even blames herself. Yet she confronts her son’s death with fierce and immutable intelligence; ultimately, this means a reminder that “The Role of Elegy” is not to expunge a poet’s grief, but can instead be a tribute to a life, or a person who was and is very real:

Come on stage and be yourself,
The elegist says to the dead. Show them
Now—after the fact—
What you were meant to be:

The performer of a live song.
A shoe. Now bow.
What is left but this:
The compulsion to tell.

These lines regard the difficulty one can have with the urge to “explain” oneself to other humans. We are authorities on our own lives, yet none of can properly know the totality of his or her own life; it is impossible to see its completion. It becomes the role of the elegist to tell the tale: not always of the person’s specific actions and deeds, but of that person at his or her greatest moments of inspiration: what s/he was “meant to be.”

The poet never states explicitly how her son died, though she gives his age (37) and hints that his death had to do with drug addiction: “this last act where you disappear / Behind the curtain of addiction catastrophe.” Her son died a full-grown adult, not a child, but it seems a mother never outgrows the feeling she should be the protector, a sensation fully realized in this recollection from “Worse”:

                                                  …Death is
A jerky reversal of forward momentum.
Back into memory. Into a cereal bowl
On a table decades ago, the color of an orange
Aspirin for a fever at age four
That produced a heat-filled forehead hallucination.
Think of a hive made of glass, all the bees,
Theoretically at least, describable but not all at once.
That’s my mind and you
Are doing all the things you ever did at once.

In the end, I think the poet’s great elegy recognizes the constancy suggested in that final line: her son is gone, and all the moments he ever lived outlie conventional, or at least present, “time.” “All the things” he ever did have little to do with seconds passing; they are one buzzing thing.

A great elegy, then, is the result of a death so immediate and painful that there is an inevitable, if to some extent imagined, realization that death is not what you thought it was. Time passes and people watch it, record it; beyond earthly life could be space-time and stasis. Nothing, even, equally something. After Michael’s death, the poet finds “He continued to live in the space that it took / To conjure him up.” I’ll repeat something I wrote in my review of Sarah Hannah’s final book: that along these lines, time on earth is just an abstraction, and it is possible to discover that to have lived at all is to live eternally.
 
Time can seem even less than an abstraction following such an important death; time is dumb, silly, cruel, and of little need—“The dull mind is a different kind / Of world. Earth was frozen.” The poet is left amazed, equally strengthened and dulled, by the fact that a whole year can pass after a tragedy. If the world is a new thing following this kind of death, one might live it out in tribute to the deceased. Then things will be as they were: rather than being two different kinds of abstractions, our tandem can inhabit the same vacancy.

*

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In the Middle Distance

Friday, December 1st, 2006

by Linda Gregg
Graywolf Press 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

6stars_7

Fragment Rock

Gregg Cover

Do poets still employ whatever fearless political wit they can summon and work towards earning Right of First Refusal from The New Yorker? Either way the fact that nine of the poems from In the Middle Distance appeared in the magazine say something of the unique category Linda Gregg is in. Not that New Yorker ink = good poem, but it does imply a certain degree of a certain brand of smarts and political dalliance. And whatever Gregg’s done, she’s done with smarts; accordingly, In the Middle Distance is one of the most self-contained, coherent things I’ve read all year.

The 58 poems comprising the book are not separated by section numbers or titles. Though most poems function on their own, they also emerge as a larger, abstracted series of romantic meditations: imagine emptying out a jigsaw puzzle in which every piece fits into every other piece. Every poem or numbered section of a poem is only one little brick of a stanza, and poems seldom stretch onto a second page. Nevertheless, each piece implies the poem that follows it, and implies the book as an autonomous unit.

The meditations are often emotive, sometimes too much so, which accounts for the book’s only consistent flaw. In “Arriving Again and Again without Noticing,” Gregg’s speaker reminisces about “all different kinds of years” before closing with the suggestion she’s self-actualized: “It’s strange that my heart is as full / now as my desire was then.” Yucky-sweet as that is, she makes up for it; like any good series, Gregg’s poems contradict each other from time to time, and the excellent last poem, “Highway 90,” shows that continued confusion and indecision are seamless with life at any age, regardless of one’s level of “desire” or fullness of “heart.” Here it is in its entirety:

An owl lands on the side
of the road. Turns its head
to look at me going fast,
window open to the night
on the desert. Clean air,
and the great stars.
I’m trying to decide
if this is what I want.

Her romantic assertions—many of which involve the word “heart”—don’t resonate because they detract from a dazzling thread of chance and indecision. In most cases Gregg allows the fragmented pieces to dictate and reveal themselves to her, each poem title becoming more or less the “topic” of the poem. The best poems begin with abstract ideas and fuse them with imagery, the handsomest arrow in her quiver. These poems are also chiseled, often employing sentence fragments for rhythmic punch, as in the opening to “The Problem of Sentences”: “A sentence is an idea. An idea with urgency. / A feeling for the sun before it rises.” Another fine idea/image fusion occurs in “Beauty”:

When my father heard his beloved dog
had chased and killed the rancher’s sheep,
he went right out and shot it. Because,
he said, once they ran with the pack
and tasted blood, it would never stop.

Perhaps the most telling lines in the whole book occur in “Parian Marble”: “I would like to hold / something up against ruin.” The word “something” implies she doesn’t know what, and improvised-yet-focused lyrics of In the Middle Distance are a stab at that something. The book, which Gregg explains in the notes took her five years to write, is an inquisitive quarrel with the divine; she allows herself to build fragments with the confidence that fragments—questions—can cohere. Here, they do. So it’s easy to get sucked out of her world when lines like “It fills me with tenderness” and “To make the day rise / out of the heart’s darkness” (both from the same poem) hand you a lollipop and beg you to confirm that God is Good. There are maybe one too many of such “sweet” moments to make the whole thing a slam dunk, but it’s awfully close. The great poems are many (“Surviving Love” and “Quietly” to name a pair), and when Gregg is good, she works like a punch in the gut you probably deserved.

Finally I’ll add this. We know Linda Gregg is smart. Academic even. But nothing new can be said about Orpheus. Especially in poems. Please stop; this goes for everybody. When Gregg brings in Orpheus in “I Do Not Need the Gods to Return,” it’s fitting cause to simply turn the page, because face it, who among us can stand another poem about Orpheus. I guess everyone wants to write the “ultimate” Orpheus poem. Sweet. Here’s what I recommend: write a book called Orpheus Poems in which Orpheus does everything from buy his Mom a birthday cake to throw Eurydice over his shoulder and, sword in hand, battle his way out of hell; Make him jump beside a trampoline and sleep with a transvestite hooker. Then we can finally put the Orpheus thing to rest—“No Orpheus to sing again” indeed.

*

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Dear Ghosts,

Wednesday, November 1st, 2006

by Tess Gallagher
Graywolf Press 2007
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

3_5

Back Inaction

gallagher coverIf there are two hyphenated words to describe Tess Gallagher’s new collection, they are long-awaited and long-winded. Despite the fact that Dear Ghosts, is Gallagher’s first book of exclusively new poems in 13 years and undoubtedly much—worthy of the poet’s pen—has happened in those years, the book should have been at least 50 pages shorter. It crawls on for 140 pages and the last line of the book, though oddly comforting, is not without the sense that Gallagher would have liked to indulge in another twenty pages or so: “And all goes on—.”

For Gallagher, death is a constant. Her husband Raymond Carver passed away in 1988 and later Gallagher found herself diagnosed with cancer and fighting for her own life. The tragedy of 9/11 presents yet another Herculean subject that she tackles, for example, in poems like “Sayonara Baby.” Though she is able to address this subject without causing immediate abhorrence, she causes it eventually with lines like “Being born American stains, sustains me.” There is nothing worse than manifest word play. But, for the most part, Gallagher does death well; she remains sweet about it, giving it a sort of desirable effect that many other poets are unable (or unwilling) to provide. But unfortunately Gallagher is nostalgic about nearly every subject, and nostalgia—though sometimes satisfying—can spread like an virus.

Other poems, such as “The Dogs of Bucharest,” also deal with the state of the U.S. since the 9/11 attacks. Gallagher aptly points out that fear dictates:

…black shovels full of earth tossed
into an open grave that is everywhere
when fear is the predominant language.

The poem grapples with communication and language, trying to manipulate “one heart’s currency to another / without spiritual loss.” The poem’s first and third sections are successful. But there seems an epidemic of poetry as the subject for poetry and Gallagher falls victim to this in the second section of the poem. Writing about poetry is in many cases an indication that the poet has little else to talk about, and in these cases nothing is sacrificed in merely cutting the “we are drunk on poetry” drivel. In a subsequent poem Gallagher hits us with her working definition of poetry as though she is trying to affirm that this is why poetry should be written: “it is beautifully made for exploring the miraculous / ordinary event.” Okay, thanks. Frankly, I don’t care why anyone writes poetry; why I read their poetry seems far more crucial.

Beyond death Gallagher has other, often insightful obsessions. Birds offer a sort of spiritual perspective without being overbearing. However, even when birds are the subject, they are usually dead, as in “Not a Sparrow,” a poem primarily about escape. Yet it is still clear the book is about the fact that death is drawing closer. “Sky House” seems a recognition of this, and perhaps an acceptance of it, a reconciliation. The poem is momentarily reminiscent of Plath’s “Mirror.” Offering both wit and strong image, Gallagher writes, “I rise / into the day like a fish.” Very similar are Plath’s final lines in “Mirror” which also deal with aging and the approach of death: “In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman / rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.” Any conjuring of Plath is mostly good. Though Plath does it better.

While verbose, Dear Ghosts, does present a worthwhile arc. If you focus on her shinier, transcendent-without-knowing-they’re-transcendent moments, you’ll find courage and wisdom that’s nothing short of empowering. I’ll save you the trouble; read these excellent poems: “Not a Sparrow,” “Brushing Fate,” “Offering,” “What the New Day is For,” “Dear Ghosts,” and “Death’s Ink.” It’s kind of like the prop comic Gallagher: a little goes a long way. If you feel like hammering through all 140 pages, though, I’ll leave you to it.

*

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