Description
Book SynopsisFrom Kingsley Tufts Award finalist Kathy Fagan comes Bad Hobby, a perceptive collection focused on memory, class, and might-have-beens.
In a working-class family that considers sensitivity a “fatal diagnosis,” how does a child grow up to be a poet? What happens when a body “meant to bend & breed” opts not to, then finds itself performing the labor of care regardless? Why do we think our “common griefs” so singular? Bad Hobby is a hard-earned meditation on questions like these—a dreamscape speckled with swans, ghosts, and weather updates.
Fagan writes with a kind of practical empathy, lamenting pain and brutality while knowing, also, their inevitability. A dementing father, a squirrel limp in the talons of a hawk, a “child who won’t ever get born”: with age, Fagan posits, the impact of ordeals like these changes. Loss becomes instructive. Solitude becomes a shared experience. “You think your one life precious—”
And Bad Hobby thinks—hard. About lineage, about caregiving. About time. It paces “inside its head, gazing skyward for a noun or phrase to / shatter the glass of our locked cars & save us.” And it does want to save us, or at least lift us, even in the face of immense bleakness, or loneliness, or the body changing, failing. “Don’t worry, baby,” Fagan tells us, the sparrow at her window. “We’re okay.”
Trade Review“Fagan leans into descriptions of the world that pay tribute to what it is, not what it could or might be. ‘How will I choose,’ she writes, ‘between Heaven & Sorry.’ This vibrant book resides in that in-between, honoring the loss that comes with love.”—Publishers Weekly
"I drank Kathy Fagan's Bad Hobby down in one gulp, as I suspect you will, Reader. I can't imagine that anyone could set this book down with poems still unread. Fagan's subject is loss—the death of one parent, the receding of the other into dementia's distances: 'I said like, as in: like we kill time. / I mean metaphor, as when time kills us back.' 'The art of losing,' as Bishop wrote, is mastered here with intelligence, wit, tenderness, and a blending of the personal, historical, and etymological. Reader, prepare yourself for wonderment. Take time. Drink up."—Maggie Smith
“Bad Hobby is an exquisite and excruciating book of continual epiphany and insight. The poems are gorgeous, or they’re stony, or they’re both; they astutely examine caregiving, memory-making, the inscrutability of childhood, the inscrutability of old age, and how on earth to exist in between. In this tenuous time, I’m so grateful for Fagan’s brilliant excavations of hospitals and pastures and classrooms and dreamscapes and how a body learns to live and to die.”—Natalie Shapero
“The poems of Bad Hobby seem familiar because they are familiar. We recognize ourselves in these lines and stories. We see ourselves as children, adults, and the elderly.”—Tweet Speak Blog
Praise for Sycamore
“It’s hard not to fall in love with this book, with its bravado and vulnerability. Kathy Fagan’s mind is endless with depth and truth—her thoughts like songs, her heart and wit twin birds flying in the air of the pages, landing on the tree limbs of her lines. How fierce and immense to imagine living in her grove of sycamores, hardy, odd, and gorgeous. There, we are bigger than ourselves—we are each other too, living and remembering within each other’s shadows, limbs, sky. Sycamore is a book a reader clutches to her chest, eyes closed for a moment in bliss and recognition.”—Brenda Shaughnessy
“Sycamore is a complex and layered poetic consideration of the mortality of relationships, of the body, of eros, and, most generally, of the moments in time we momentarily inhabit. These are timeless poetic themes, but what Kathy Fagan does with them is stunningly original. From the cryptic and fascinating ‘Platanaceae Family Tree’ that opens the book, Sycamore is erudite and referential and nonetheless consistently welcoming as we navigate Fagan’s inventive structures and nuanced wordplay. This collection gives us a full view of the human heart and mind simultaneously in action.”—Wayne Miller
“Kathy Fagan’s poems are pitiless, sensual, mythic, and steeped in elucidative mystery. I admire her sleek armor of language and landscape: she may ‘dress defensively’; however, ‘all that pristine weather / and footwear later to discover: dead is still dead.’ Fagan’s sleights of hand reveal yet withhold, out of mercy, hard-won beauty and pain: ‘Sycamore. Sick amour. Seek no more.’ Sycamore is one of the most inventive, vulnerable, and moving collections I have read in years.”—Randall Mann
“Kathy Fagan’s poems burn like halos, and if sycamores could bow, they would bend to kiss her hands for rendering them in such haunting light, in such daring reach. Don’t miss this beautiful, knowing book.”—Barbara Ras
“Sycamore, Fagan’s dynamic fifth collection of poems, explores the loss of a loved one through the singular and deeply personal voice of one woman and, in so doing, evokes the gut-wrenching effects of grief through vibrant, ever-evolving images culled from the natural world.” —Kenyon Review
“Sycamore delights as much in its close inspection of the natural world as it does in the auditory pleasures of its language. ‘Sycamore. Sick amour. Seek no more,’ the speaker recites, and we know we are in the hands of a gifted word master. ‘Though they are not a choir . . . not Kabuki,; the trees become a temporary stand in for love, for her ‘amours,’ providing the solace and steadiness necessary to stage a rebirth.”—Boston Review
“Sycamore burns like ice, with a seemingly cool crystalline surface nonetheless hot to the touch. . . . Fagan’s flinty, well-crafted poems abound with texture and verve, and make an excellent companion for meteorological or existential cold snaps.”—Publishers Weekly
“Fagan erects a veritable forest in her fifth collection. Austere and elegant, the first poems call forth a cold, still world inhabited by ghosts. . . . Still, though, there is substantial hope. Trees grow, emotions thicken, and, structurally, poems melt: shorter, tenser lines ultimately give way to sprawling ones.”—Booklist
Table of Contents1
Dedicated
Forest
Stray
Animal Prudence
Cooper’s Hawk
Farm Evening in the Blue Smoke
At the Champion Avenue Low-Income Senior & Child Care Services Center
AccuWeather: Real Feel
Keelson
Dahlia
Foreshortening
Cognition
My Father
Bad Hobby
2
Empire
Fountain
The Rule of Three
Helvetica
Omphalos
The Ghost on the Handle
Predator Satiation
AccuWeather: Episodes of Sunshine
The Supreme Farewell of Handkerchiefs
Birds Are Public Animals of Capitalism
Personal Item
The Children
“Where I Am Going”/“I Dare to Live”
Topless
Mint
Morning
3
Latecomer
What Kind of Fool Am I
Conqueror
School
AccuWeather: Windy, with Clouds Breaking
Window
Trace
Wisdom
Aftermath
My Mother
Ohio Spring Jingo
Snow Moon & the Dementia Unit
Scarlet Experiment
Lucky Star
Inactive Fault, with Echoes
Notes
Acknowledgments
