Suitor
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
At the heart of Joshua Rivkin’s debut collection Suitor is a profound wrestling with desire, history, and the big questions of how we make and perform a self in the world. In conversation with the confessional tradition, Suitor begins with a sequence of poems about a mother’s boyfriends and lovers, and how these relationships inform the speaker’s own understanding about eros and masculinity. At the center of the book is a lyric essay, “The Haber Problem,” that moves beyond the self and personal history to retell the story of the scientist Fritz Haber. Later sequences and poems reflect on the past with erotic directness, longing, and lyric intensity. With grace and honesty, the poems of Suitor ask what it means to be a suitor in the fullest sense—to follow, to pursue, to chase the inexplicable hunger at the heart of desire.
Customer Reviews
Excellent poems about desire, family
This new collection of poems examines family, and memory, and ultimately forgiveness. The book is divided in two sections with a lyric essay in the middle called “The Hager Problem.” The first section looks at suitors as an observer. The second section is informed by the first, the observer becomes the subject.
I don’t know how to describe poetry without saying raw or visceral or evocative 85 times, so I’ll just say read this book. Is everything context? Is context everything? I took a creative non-fiction class with this writer earlier in the year through Stanford Continuing Studies. It was online, he was somewhere in the east, I was in California, others from around the world. This was one of the best writing classed I’ve ever taken and Josh was one of the best teachers ever. I learned so much and haven’t written anything since, which isn’t the fault of the class, just the context of this year. Losing my father a week before the class started changed my writing, making the need immediate, preventing words from flowing. So much of this collection is about fathers and I can only see it through the lens of loss right now. Anyway, these poems are excellent. If poetry makes you nervous, I think these are easy to read but layered, welcoming rereads without confounding. ★★★★★ • Trade Paperback • Poetry, Essay • Published by Red Hen Press on September 1, 2020. ◾︎