Nick Flynn’s LOW was published yesterday by Graywolf. The title (and epigraph) is from a hauntingly beautiful song by a band with the same name.
Flynn’s poems haunt in very much the same way, one of the big themes of this set of poems being “home,” and what it means to those who come from a childhood of trauma as they provide home to a child they parent. The poems engage with our recent pandemic and quarantine, what it means to be in your home (if you are lucky) rather than the outside world. The poems engage with the unhoused (as did Flynn’s memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City). And the poems engage with our home country, America, and its depravity (the book honors George Floyd) and an ancestral home—in Flynn’s case, Ireland. There are three big “note” prose poems in the book, one of which is “Notes on a Calendar Found in a Stranger’s Apartment.” In this poem, Flynn is invited into the home of his deceased neighbor and offered a flatscreen TV. He catalogues the objects he encounters with affection and reverence—a retro calendar, a mysterious Polaroid, fortunes from cookies. This poem serves as a haunting once again of who we are as we try to make connections and what we will ultimately leave behind. LOW is an enchanting and important book.
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Author: Denise Duhamel
