If Men, Then: Poems

Description

If Men, Then, Eliza Griswold's second poetry collection, charts a radical spiritual journey through catastrophe. Griswold's language is forthright and intimate as she steers between the chaos of a tumultuous inner world and an external landscape littered with SUVs, CBD oil, and go-bags, talismans of our time. Alternately searing and hopeful, funny and fraught, the poems explore the world's fracturing through the collapse of the ego, embodied in a character named "I"-a soul attempting to wrestle with itself in the face of an unfolding tragedy.

Eliza Griswold is the author of an acclaimed first book of poems, Wideawake Field, as well as The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam, which won the 2011 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize. Her translations of Afghan women's folk poems, I Am the Beggar of the World, was awarded the 2015 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She has held fellowships from the New America Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and Harvard University, and in 2010 the American Academy in Rome awarded her the Rome Prize for her poems. Currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University, she has published, most recently, Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, which was named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2018, one of The Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction for 2018, and a New York Times Editors' Choice. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction in 2019.

Griswold has taken the Whitmanesque 'I'--'I' as everyone--and made it unmistakably singular . . . Though the sequence nods to the surreal and the psychological--Rimbaud's 'Je est un autre'--there are also echoes of John Berryman and Sylvia Plath, poets closer to home whose self-awareness was enacted on the page in the form of characters, masks, new selves . . . wry and intimate, sophisticated and all [Griswold's] own--imagining the adventure that is being. --Kevin Young, The New Yorker This second poetry collection from Griswold is profoundly of its moment (just look at the CBD oil references), but its language feels somehow eternal. --Emma Specter, Vogue [Griswold] writes poems so emotionally charged they seem on the verge of spilling over . . . palpable and provocative poems that can be appreciated by broad audience. --Karla Huston, Library Journal