Customer Reviews

My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge

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I was having a rotten day and decided to spend my lunch break at the old local used bookstore. I (and my anemic wallet) had absolutely no intention on buying anything, but I nonetheless half-heartedly picked up Paul Guest's "My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge" because I was charmed by the title. Not knowing anything about the book or its author, I began reading random poems, really just looking for an excuse to NOT buy the book, and was shamelessly hooked. Helpless in the face of Guest's poetry, the book found a permanent home in my bag and for the next week and a half solid, I did nothing but revel in it.

I honestly cannot speak highly enough of this evocative, sharp and darkly hilarious collection of poetry.

Take, for instance, Guest's "User's Guide to Physical Debilitation," the poem which starts the book. In speaking about his paralysis (Guest is a quadriplegic, due to an accident when he was 12), Guest does not hold back any punches.

He writes: "When not an outright impossibility / or form of neurological science fiction, / sexual congress will either be with / tourists in the kingdom of your tragedy, / performing an act of sadistic charity; / with the curious, for whom you will be beguilingly blank canvas; / or with someone blindly feeling their way / through an extended power outage / caused by summer storms you once thought romantic."

Sakes alive! And that's the first poem!

His work is brutally honest yet brashly surreal. You are never sure of your footing in his poetry, where triumphs can appear like failures, failures like triumphs, and love like a empty gesture or the one thing that makes everything else worth it.

In "Remember How Sad That Was Then," he writes: "I missed the sadness because I no longer missed you, / how emotionally counterintuitive it was / as my citizenship in the nation I made of you / gradually lapsed."

In "My Arms," he writes: "My arms are most cosmetic. When I say this / to a stranger, often he'll wince / like he wants to hide inside his eyes. / Vanish from the day. I shouldn't laugh, / should be tired of twenty-one years into the telling of a poor joke, / made of pain, nerves snuffed our like wicks."

I honestly could fill this whole review with excerpts from this book, the way the poems dip and swerve, dive and rise, how the poems crack your skull and swings your guts around, the laughs and gasps and awe-struck silences the book inspires. These are poems that you can read and reread and reread and still make new discovers and have new insights.

I strongly recommend this book, and am excited for his forthcoming memoir. What a terrific and stunning new voice!

I was lucky enough to hear Paul Guest read from this work at the Georgia Center for the Book. His poetry is both humorous and emotionally powerful. I found myself laughing at many of his opening lines, but I must admit to feeling great affection for some of his more lyrically loving phrases. A beautiful book that deserves to be explored.

Pleasingly bleak. 'I never thought I'd tire of being a mammal' (p44). The three 'letters home' are good, also Audio Commentary Track 2 which begins 'As you can already see, everything is f****d'. Except, sometimes, love. Keep at it, Guest!