Dear Wallace

Honestly, before reading this I didn’t know very much about Wallace Stevens beyond him being a poet. After reading I did do some research on him and now I wonder if I would have enjoyed the book more if I had done that first. This book had some very beautiful poems, but I just didn’t connect with them.

I knew this could be a quick read, but it was hard for me to get through. I am not used to the run on style of poetry so it was hard for me to stick with without taking a break, but hard for me to take a break without being worried about cutting off the flow. There were some really good lines but all in all, I just could not get immersed into it. There were some stanzas that were interesting and visual and I can appreciate the messages about creation and life cycling. I could see how a particular audience might have better luck with it.

Thanks to NetGalley and University of Nebraska Press for the ARC!

Julie Choffel’s "Dear Wallace" is a stupefying delight, a collection characterized by all the mystery and surprise of static electricity—so unexpected that you immediately withdraw to try to understand what happened.

This is a difficult book to pin down, but its brilliance lies in how it plays with flippancy as a form. These pages are filled with quirkily observed mundanities, and in the moments that readers are most likely to disengage, the speaker suddenly breaks through with a pithy reflection. For example, the following lines stopped me in my tracks and show Choffel tipping her hand:

"Invention, we’re taught, works backward / anyway: first fusion, then its uses."

It’s moments like this that get at a thematic center—we’ve all got a lot on our minds, but there’s a lot of life in the way of us dealing with it. Does inertia hold us back or hold us up?

It feels like the book revolves around the countless forms of mediation between the self and the world, but part of what makes it so fascinating is how the speaker hints that’s there’s nothing on the other side—the world is its own mediation. The closer these poems drift to unadorned nonsense, the more they seem to touch on some essential truth:

"A temporary thing / came to leave me more real / than I was before."

If it sounds like Choffel simply indulges every stereotypical pretense one would expect in poetry, the opposite is true. Each line has an indie pop sensibility, bubbling over without ever being twee. These pieces take the form of shuffling, tongue-in-cheek thoughts—the kind of warm nihilism that moves out of the way as soon as it’s time to make plans for lunch.

This is a fantastic book, and I’m excited to share it with others and read it again.

This had a creepier vibe than anticipated! Did not finish this as it started going in a dark direction that I couldn't vibe with.

Julie Choffel's Dear Wallace is a beautiful dialogue between the poet and Wallace Stevens. Choffel's poetic conversations with Stevens made me think about his works in a new light. Her poems, like Stevens, help me to see the mundane aspects of the world in a new way. This is a book I will return to again and again.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an eARC; all opinions are my own.