I always blanch when someone tells me—and always so assuredly, it seems—“ I just don’t really like poetry.” It’s more people, more otherwise avid readers than I would like to think.
The deciders of the Publishers Weekly Best 10 list “ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz.” Which is kind of brilliant in a way. Because everyone knows if you ignore things, you can maybe make those things go away.
I’m a promiscuous lover of books. I treat each one as if it’s the only—there will never be another after, there were none before. This is the last book I read and the last book I loved.
Why do so many of us, as readers or maybe as a society, assume that originality springs forth out of nothing, although at the same time we understand that every idea, every story, has a precedent?