Review: A Handbook of Disappointed Fate by Anne Boyer

Reviewed by Katharine Coldiron

A Handbook of Disappointed Fate
Essays by Anne Boyer
Ugly Duckling Presse, April 2018
$20.00, 239 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1937027926

Thirty-three essays is a lot for a single collection, even if the essays all concerned a single topic. But Anne Boyer’s A Handbook of Disappointed Fate roams, and then rages, like a graceful and passionate animal in heat. It is too much to be contained in a pen, or, seemingly, in a single book. Boyer writes with equal intensity on Missy Elliott’s video for “WTF” and living through breast cancer, on Colette and Kansas City. She has an opinion on almost anything, I wager; she offers so many of them here, across so many different contexts, that reading the book leaves the reader mentally worn out, ready for a bag of Cheetos and the shallowest sitcom possible. And she disburses all of it with the same crystalline, unerring language, the consistency of which forms the durable connective tissue of this collection.

Maybe there are readers who can outlast Boyer’s quick mind, and get through this book in one sitting, but I would very much like to meet them and give them the Turing test. It took me weeks to read this book, weeks in which I plodded uneventfully through a dozen novels and other collections. Every time I picked it up again, Boyer was waiting for me, as impassioned and confident as she had been when I put the book down the last time. Are you ready for more? she taunted, from the printed lines. No, I’d wail, and fold down another page on another glittering insight. From “Click-Bait Thanatos,” for example:

I was thinking about post-privacy then because in 2010, Wikileaks had begun its experiment with the limits of critique, and many still believed in the logic of exposure. With the lights on, went the thinking, humanity would no longer abide the mess. But the mess abides, only now with brighter lighting.

Embroider that on a pillow, and think of it every time someone says things are getting worse, or better.

“The mess abides” could be an internal truth for the essay collection, too. Boyer knows her stuff—she footnotes dutifully—and presents a tone of insistent intellectual rigor throughout. But the enormous range of topics, and the speed with which she covers them (many essays are between three and five pages, some much shorter), make this collection feel chaotic, ill at ease with itself. Every sentence is stuffed with meaning, and the sentences build relentlessly. The poet’s gift for compression contributes to the buzz each essay sets up in the reader’s brain, but Boyer’s evident, blazing intelligence doesn’t hurt. As her essay “Hey Bo Diddley!” points out, “virtuosity is the messiest shit around. Everything spills out that way.” This collection is proof. It’s cut into small, orderly pieces, but the actual reading experience spills ideas, words, opinions, and research all over the place.

For all this, Boyer is also funny. “One thing mortality has going for it is that when you are dead you no longer have to do the dishes,” she assures me. And she’s heartfelt:

It’s always when you can’t write that you realize your writing is more important than ever, when you can’t understand that your understanding is vital to your life. It’s always that the most important poetry is the poetry of the moment poetry isn’t there.

Yes, there’s some Gertrude Stein influence in there, some exhaustive and specific use of language that wrings any trace of sentimentality away. But something important has still been spoken, and can’t be ignored. Boyer’s frankness gives the reader something intentional, something from which all the tiresome qualities of writing, the aspects that make you remember the marks on the page and the ticks of the clock, have been stripped away. Dare I call it truth?

A Handbook of Disappointed Fate is named for one of its essays, but the designation of “handbook” is appropriate. Handbooks are not meant to be swallowed in one gulp; they are meant to be consulted when relevant situations arise. I’ll be consulting this handbook when I encounter the work of photographer Jo Spence (“The Kinds of Pictures She Would Have Taken”) or the poet Karin Brodine (“Woman Sitting at a Machine”). Or when I want a well-researched perspective, executed with slightly daffy repetition, on the phrase “my life” as it applies to a given work of art (“My Life”). I’ll consult it to read a trenchant outsider on my home city of Los Angeles (“Please Stand Still the Doors Are Closing”). I’ll reread its instructions on “Difficult Ways to Publish Poetry” when I feel that the mini-genre of writing humorously unrealistic instruction manuals has become too stale to endure. And I’ll read the opener, “No,” whenever I want to meditate on refusal. I’ll read this book, and read it, and read it, well into the future, again and again. But not too quickly.

Katharine Coldiron‘s work has appeared in Ms., the Rumpus, the Collagist, Entropy, and elsewhere. She lives in California and blogs at the Fictator.