[For this year’s
installment of my annual
Beach Reads series, I wanted to highlight books I’m looking forward to
checking out. That means I’ll have less to say about them, of course—but I hope
you’ll share your thoughts on these and/or your own Beach Read recommendations
for a crowd-sourced weekend post that’ll go great with suntan lotion and iced
beverages!]
On a poetry
collection you should pack right next to that page-turning thriller in your
beach bag.
I’ve said
it before, and I’ll say it again: poetry
collections make good beach reading too! As I wrote in those earlier posts,
I get that poetry tends (for many readers) to conjure up images of classroom recitations
or explication assignments, of Shakespearean sonnets and metres with funny
classical names, of required rather than pleasure reading. But the most intimate
and evocative poems not only bring their own very palpable pleasures, but also
make for particularly effective bursts of beach reading, brief dives into the
literary in between the games of Frisbee or strolls by the water’s edge.
I don’t yet know
much of anything about Ocean
Vuong’s debut collection Night Sky with
Exit Wounds that I didn’t read in this
wonderful New York Times review, but
the book sounds like it could very definitely offer those kinds of intimate and
potent pleasures. I know that the Vietnam War and the refugee experience don’t
exactly scream “pleasure read,” but one of my goals in these Beach Read series
is to expand
our conversation about what kinds of pleasures reading can give us, and the
value of bringing them all with us on our vacations and escapes. Both the Ian
Williams and the Langston Hughes collections I recommended in those earlier
poetry posts are still worth a slot in your beach bag—and I look forward to
bringing Vuong’s collection with me this time around.
Last prospective
Beach Reads tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Thoughts on
this book? Other Beach Reads you’d share?
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