My Feelings

by Nick Flynn

Overview

A daring and intimate new book by the poet and memoirist Nick Flynn, "a champion of contemporary American poetry" (Newpages)


. . . the take from his bank jobs, all of it

will come to me, if I can just get him to draw me a map, if I can find the tree, if I can find

the shovel. And the house, the mansion he grew up in, soon a lawyer will pass

a key across a walnut desk, but even this lawyer will not be able to tell me where this

mansion is.
—from "Kafka"

In My Feelings, Nick Flynn makes no claims on anyone else's. These poems inhabit a continually shifting sense of selfhood, in the attempt to contain quicksilver realms of emotional energy—from grief and panic to gratitude and understanding.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555977108
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	06/02/2015
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	922,080
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.20(d)

About the Author

NICK FLYNN's work—which includes Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, winner of the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Memoir, and the poetry collections Blind Huber and Some Ether—has been translated into thirteen languages.

Editorial Reviews

06/15/2015
In his fourth poetry collection, poet and memoirist Flynn (The Reenactments) explores appetite and grief, clarity and absurdity, in lines of great technical skill and feeling. In “Kafka,” Kafka’s death is echoed in the worsening condition of the speaker’s father, blending impending familial and legal considerations with the surreal: “And the house, the mansion he/ grew up in, soon a lawyer will pass// a key across a walnut desk, but even this/ lawyer will not be able to tell me where this// mansion is.” While several of the poems address family deaths, Flynn equally interrogates the present as it unfolds, full of as-yet uncertain significances. In “Father, Insect” the speaker’s daughter contemplates her father prior to fatherhood, which leads the speaker to wonder, “When/ did want become more// than hunger, when// did need become more/ than shadow?” Biblical references in what is an intimate collection offer a sense of shared narrative and searching: “Saul was a sailor on the boat to Damascus/ He did not know what he was/ Paul turned to a voice it rose up from the waves/ It chained his boat to the darkness.” Though there is grief and loss in Flynn’s poems, there is comfort in life’s continuity, and the unknowing is rich with possibility. (June)

Publishers Weekly

From the first moment I looked up from a page Nick Flynn had written on, I was a goner: I wasn't where I used to be; I went somewhere with him, into consciousness itself, into time, into a story so shattered that only poetry could begin to tell it. Here he is again, writing as if his life depends on it, using every trick he can find to carve the tunnel through the mountain. Words are what he uses; silence is the sound they make. Nick Flynn keeps resuscitating himself, and in doing so he refreshes and reaffirms the personal lyric as a crucial and necessary art. I read Nick Flynn's poetry to feel alive.” —Marie Howe

“Each word is a lit match, a thrown stone, a howling blast, a choking torrent. Flynn has forged daringly intimate and clarion poems of conscience.” —Booklist on Nick Flynn

“[Flynn's] books of poetry—Some Ether, Blind Huber, The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands—all ask difficult questions and leave us with a beautiful acceptance that there is often no answer at all, that our memories arrange things in ways that may or may not offer closure. There is something about his work that allows us to exhale, to sit in our own messes and be okay.” —Rumpus on Nick Flynn

From the Publisher