AUTHOR: Roberto Bolaño
READ: December
THOUGHTS: Have read a bunch of the poems in here already. I enjoyed this poetry collection, though I have to admit that my opinion of these poems is obviously filtered through my already-existing obsession with Bolaño. There was actually probably more here that I disliked than 'liked'...well maybe that is a bit harsh! I think there are some aspects of Bolaño's poetry that I don't really enjoy, and I think it's because it is in his poems that his most sentimental impulses come out. Stuff like "no one is braver than poetry" or whatever...maybe I have a diminished opinion of the importance or 'bravery' of poetry...Zurita did, like, scar his cheek or whatever, and Bolaño was arrested when he was younger than I was, and poets today probably just complain about iPhones or something...well I guess writers today in general, or really just any young person born in the mid to late 80's living in the United States. There are definitely a bunch of poems in here that I really enjoyed. I also feel like the tonal and syntactic quality of his poems are an interesting counterpoint to his fiction, in that it sort of crystallizes the "Bolaño tone" and distills it into colloquial speech mixed with some sort of weird image-based-mystery-cum-abstraction thing. I also enjoyed the themes/setting for a lot of these poems: prostitutes, Mexico City as smog and violence void, sci-fi opining, putting your head into a black hole and thinking about that, etc. Yeah, good good I like it all, etc.
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