![]() ![]() They’re the neighbors with the curtains drawn but you can still hear someone practicing piano on the inside. Both women share a quiet, unmistakeable intelligence that comes out in their humor. For Toews, the autofiction is recognizable as plot in Davis’s case, I suspect her chosen narrators echo some part of her interiority that is intricate, equivocal, and self-conscious. Davis and Toews also blur life and fiction. Although I doubt that either writer would identify as poets, they deploy poetic compression-not quite minimalism, but efficiency. Toews is similarly impressive at the paragraph level: she can overlay the past on the present, make you laugh and cry, drop you off miles from where you started. They do not apologize for either.ĭavis’s careful, correct sentences offer a tutorial in syntax, in respect for the language, in suspense and releasing information. Their writing is at once sharp with theory and supple with lyricism. Neither Vuong nor Belcourt is afraid of beauty or love or the heady abstractions that previous generations of poets were warned against. Two by Two (also known as the Royal Twin Song) is a song sung by Amber and James separately in their own versions, in the Sofia the First episode Two. Instead, they are socially and politically conscious, with an unusual maturity, insight, and courage, especially when confronting generational and personal trauma. They are prodigies, but not the turn-of-the-century kind of prodigy that dashed off glitzy sentences. Roughly five years ago, these two writers burst on the scene with startling, highly acclaimed debut poetry collections. Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds(Copper Canyon Press)īilly-Ray Belcourt, This Wound is a World (University of Minnesota Press) Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (One World)ĭavid Chariandy, I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (Bloomsbury) Their books are intent on setting and sticking to specific artistic terms to the death. They don’t share a voice (they’re inimitable) so much as a commitment to a vision. Moshfegh and Schofield are merciless with their characters and readers. Being in the heads of their first-person narrators produces a pressured tightness akin to claustrophobia or a literary panic attack. They are the neighbors with the lawnless, overgrown garden, windchimes, and rocking chair on the porch. Moshfegh and Schofield’s books can make you feel like you’re going crazy. Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation (Penguin Books) Yet sometimes the resemblances are so strong that you wonder if they’re not just neighbors, but relatives. Tea For Two was written for the comedy musical No, No, Nanette by composer Vincent Youmans and lyricist Irving Caesar. I imagine them as living on either side of a semi-detached house: each household retains its distinctiveness although they may share a roof, a driveway, and a mail carrier. They resemble each other in terms of style, subject matter, approach, or artistic values. These pairs of writers make good, neighborly companions on a bookshelf.
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