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How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons)

Poetry

Audiobook (Includes supplementary content)
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

""A gorgeous collection. . . . These poems unplug from TV and social media and the outrage of the moment and turn our attention to the immediate and the everlasting, human intimacy and the power and mystery of nature."" Tampa Bay Times

In this intimate collection, Barbara Kingsolver, beloved author of The Poisonwood Bible and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Demon Copperhead, and recipient of numerous literary awards including the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguish Contribution to American Letters, trains her eye on the everyday and the metaphysical in poems that are beautifully crafted, emotionally rich, and luminous

In her second poetry collection, Kingsolver offers reflections on the practical, the spiritual, and the wild. She begins with "how to" poems addressing everyday matters such as being hopeful, married, divorced; shearing a sheep; praying to unreliable gods; doing nothing at all; and of course, flying. Next come rafts of poems about making peace (or not) with the complicated bonds of friendship and family, and making peace (or not) with death, in the many ways it finds us. Some poems reflect on the redemptive powers of art and poetry itself; others consider where everything begins. Closing the book are poems that celebrate natural wonders—birdsong and ghost-flowers, ruthless ants, clever shellfish, coral reefs, deadly deserts, and thousand-year-old beech trees—all speaking to the daring project of belonging to an untamed world beyond ourselves.

Altogether, these are poems about transcendence: finding breath and lightness in life and the everyday acts of living. It's all terribly easy and, as the title suggests, not entirely possible. Or at least, it is never quite finished.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

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    • AudioFile Magazine
      Barbara Kingsolver delivers her poetry of the everyday with sweet-voiced accessibility and a hint of Appalachia tang. The subjects range from losing weight (or not), peonies, sheep shearing, and knitting--"By involving fiber in my invocation of divinity/I feel assured of a fairly positive outcome"--to marriage, her mother's death, and visiting a "burying ground"--"This cemetery is full of too much living." It's a mix of personal subjects that people often keep private, made universal by Kingsolver's going public. How to get a divorce--"Don't fight for these: The car that's not paid for/Every gift you pretended to like." Kingsolver reads unhurriedly, savoring the mix and match of words, giving listeners time to enjoy them with her. A.C.S. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
    • Library Journal

      August 28, 2020

      Award-winning novelist Kingsolver's second book of poetry (after 1992's Another America) contains seven sections covering everything from how to marry, to what Vincent Van Gogh may have said to his mail carrier (based on his painting of Joseph Roulin in the Barnes Museum), to a family reunion in Italy, to the ways trees communicate with one another, as in the poem, "Forests of Antarctica," in which Kingsolver muses on trees that existed thousands of years ago before the trials of Socrates and were "ringed with moss" by the time Jesus walked on water. Most of the poems are written in blocks of free verse, with some of them set up like prose poems. The exception is "Insomniac Villanelle," which discusses who to read and what to think about when you cannot sleep and which exhibits the musicality--repetition, rhyme, and meter--one associates with the form. VERDICT Ranging from the title's numerous lessons to a reading list for insomniacs, the poems in this genial new volume generally exude a pleasing sense of mystery, as exemplified by those in the final section, "The Nature of Objects." Appropriate for most collections.--C. Diane Scharper, Johns Hopkins Univ., Baltimore, MD

      Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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