Get Me Through the Next Five Minutes: Odes to Being Alive
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- 12,99 €
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- 12,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
"Parker is articulate and provocative, seeing the poetry in the ordinary and the wonderful in the world." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Parker offers some loose advice for living (give money to panhandlers whole-heartedly, because doing so means participating in ‘the same divine economy that big-banged you into being’), but is at his best when poring over life’s strange resonances…pays vivid homage to the beauty of the mundane." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
From the vertiginously talented James Parker, a collection of uproarious odes that show how to find gratitude in unexpected places.
Our politics are broken; our world is melting; the next catastrophe looms. Enter James Parker, who for years now has been writing odes of appreciation on subjects from the seemingly minor (“Ode to Naps”) to the unexpected (“Ode to Giving People Money”) to the seemingly minor, unexpected, and hyperspecific (“Ode to Running in Movies”). Finally collecting Parker’s beloved and much-lauded odes in one place, this volume demonstrates the profound power of the form. Each ode is an exercise in gratitude. Each celebrates the permanent susceptibility of everyday humdrum life to dazzling saturations of divine light: the squirrel in the street, the crying baby, the misplaced cup of tea. Parker’s odes are songs of praise, but with a decent amount of complaining in there, too: a human ratio of moans. Varied in length but unified in tone, mostly in prose, sometimes toppling into verse, the odes range across music, movies, literature, psychology, and beyond, all through the lens of Parker’s personal history. Gathered together, they form an accidental how-to guide to honoring your own experience—and to finding your own odes.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Atlantic staff writer Parker (Turned On) gathers gemlike tributes to "the essence... the quality worth exploring and if possible exalting" in childhood memories, day-to-day irritations, internet videos, fictional heroes, and anything else "that gets me through the next five minutes." Entries celebrate a squirrel's wild "pouncing runs"; fictional spy Jason Bourne as an exemplar of the "absurd condition of man"; and, in a decidedly unsentimental poem, meditation as an experience that can feel like being enclosed in "a warehouse of mental din/ pursued by a grinning zilch, with two ravens tugging at your intestines." Prizing linguistic particularity over sentimentality, Parker offers some loose advice for living (give money to panhandlers whole-heartedly, because doing so means participating in "the same divine economy that big-banged you into being"), but is at his best when poring over life's strange resonances. For instance, his wistful ode to crying babies recalls the "bitter clarion" of his infant son's voice ("In the night, it would rouse me like an electric shock") and ends with a reflection on the shortcomings of speech: "Soon you'll be talking, and language will betray you.... But right now your voice is very direct, very effective. It's going right through my head." This pays vivid homage to the beauty of the mundane.