Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog, Paul Monette

This poetry is raw pain, rage, and loss. I'm pretty sure these are the first poems that really made me cry. Monette wrote them right after his lover died, and you can tell.

My only problem is that the person who owned this before me seemed determined to assign lines to the poetry with slashes of their pen--occasionally obscuring letters and so on. Who buys a book of poetry to edit it?

Excerpt:
THE VERY SAME

the wrongest of the wrong things said that day
as I stepped from the chapel an idiot cousin
once-removed jiggled my shoulder time to turn
the page intoned like it's all been so appalling
we must hasten now to the land of brunch
there to recover our BMWs our zest for
winning and half-acre closets sorry I'm
booked weeks later still fuming with retorts
BUT THIS IS MY PAGE IT CANNOT BE TURNED
then start hearing similar from other bimboes
gotta turn the page Paul is this shit from
the Bible the sayings of Dr. Kübler-Ross
has Donohue done a show on it maybe
a ring of widows all walks of life neatly
combing real estate aerobics and young
blue-collar bowling dates spare me the pop
coping skills this page is all that's left of time
there was no page before I caught you the book
was nothing but cover painfully thin and
hopelessly derivative there's something French
in all of this perhaps la vie continue
well no it doesn't not if you freeze it in its
tracks think of this turnless page like Audobon's
elephant folio where the eagle is life-size
or a gilded burgundian leaf of hours painted
with a one-hair brush for the whole last half
of the 1400s and no bigger than a 3 X 5
dear friend I didn't become your blood-brother
lightly mine ticks just like yours but a beat
slower the geiger of Death crackles in every
room yet He cannot seem to tell who's who
as you used to say in your cranked-up bed
playful astonished But we're the same person
when did that happen with Death's signals jammed
I and my page have eluded the dart awhile
Russians in bughouses write their poems on soap
with burnt matches then get them by heart then
wash in muddy water think what they would do
with a whole page no room left on ours edge
to edge with our growing interchangeability
what you would do I think is make a paper
glider go to the brink of a high green place
let it cavort the updrafts lulling itself
by lightness to the valley floor below
while I am more likely to paper the walls
with mine scrawling why and where are you
in our common blood how shall we compromise
would a kite do do you think riding its string
in the upper air and don't forget there's
an eagle on it and the monk's gilt borders
my blood-cries are to high up to read now
oh what a page Rog how can they not see
I am only still here to be with you
my best my only page scribbled on cirrus
the high air soaring in its every word

The Perks of Being a Walflower, Stephen Chbosky

[Reread]
I picked this up wondering if it was as good as I remembered. Half an hour later, I had to admit it is.

The novel is in the form of letters our pseudonymous hero writes to a stranger somewhere. He writes about his strange family dynamic, and making new friend in high school.

This is a very good coming of age story. It's also incredibly depressing, so be ready for that.

Strange, I thought of this book when I gave my niece my own well-worn copy of Alien Blood, the anthology of Joan D. Vinge's first two Cat novels. Now I'm thinking about giving her this book.