[Note: I recently com­pleted a passel of reviews for a pub­li­ca­tion that decided not to pub­lish them. Rather than let them die on the vine, I thought I'd throw a few them up here over the next couple of days. The second and third in the series are here and here.]

Paul Guest, My Index of Slightly Hor­ri­fy­ing Knowl­edge

Poetry about the extra­or­di­nary suf­fer­ing of its author presents its read­ers with a spe­cial conun­drum. On the one hand we don’t want to pre­tend that the suf­fer­ing is inci­den­tal to the art; one of the more easily dis­pens­able things that T.S. Eliot ever wrote was that “the more per­fect the artist, the more com­pletely sep­a­rate in him will be the man who suf­fers and the mind which cre­ates.” But to err in the other direction—to read the suf­fer­ing instead of the art—well, that’s what Oprah’s for.

A reader comes wary, then, to a book like Paul Guest’s My Index of Slightly Hor­ri­fy­ing Knowl­edge. It’s not just the title: already on back cover of the book we find no fewer than three Poets Lau­re­ate warn­ing us about the “irre­versible, immense” qual­ity of Guest’s suf­fer­ing, which the jacket flap spec­i­fies: “At the age of twelve, Paul Guest suf­fered a bicy­cle acci­dent that left him par­a­lyzed for life.” Nor is this a publisher’s ploy to secure our pity in advance; the end of the first poem, “A User’s Guide to Phys­i­cal Debil­i­ta­tion,” offers a fair precis of what’s to come: