Red Sugar Book

I have not bought a book of poems in years. I heard Jan Beatty read some poems from her newest collection, The Switching/Yard, and I was so impressed by her complete vulnerability and sincerity in every line, I had to go buy her books. People who know poetry in general and her poetry in particular said I should also read this, because it was incredible. So I took their advice, and I read this first, since she wrote it first. Their advice was on the money. This was incredible.

It's about really painful stuff -- having been raped, and not knowing who her birth father was, and doing drugs, and being in all kinds of dangerous situations. But it never feels exploitative, it continues to grapple with the drive to be alive, the push for life that is in the blood ("red sugar" is her descriptive term for blood), how she continues to choose, in spite of all the shit that has happened to her, to live, dammit, not to go down without a fight, that the fighting and the living are maybe the same thing.

After I finished, I went back and read it again. On that reading, the close of one poem in particular stood out as the clarion call that maybe the collection as a whole makes. (On another reading, I might say the same of a different passage.) Here it is:

Some people say this life is just an idea of life,
but I say the highway of fear is real.

& so we have this comic, this
poem, this small, small matter of
wanting to eat the world,

swallow it up, say I was here.

Powerful, stunning stuff. I can't wait to read the next one.