A Handbook of Disappointed Fate

A Handbook of Disappointed Fate

May 2018
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A Handbook of Disappointed Fate

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SKU: 978-1-937027-92-6 Category:
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"Her writing is a balm and a bomb all its own."
— Fred Moten

About the Book

A Handbook of Disappointed Fate highlights a decade of Anne Boyer’s interrogative writing on poetry, death, love, lambs, and other impossible questions.

Available in audiobook form from Bookdance here.

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Press Release

Author

Anne Boyer

Anne Boyer is a poet and essayist from Kansas City. Her books include The Romance of Happy Workers, My Common Heart, Garments Against Women, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate and The Undying, a memoir about cancer and care. Her honors include the 2018 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a 2018 Whiting Award in nonfiction and poetry, the 2018-19 Judith E. Wilson poetry fellowship at Cambridge University, and the 2016 CLMP award for Garments Against Women. She is an Associate Professor of the Liberal Arts at the Kansas City Art Institute.

Praise

This book is brilliant. A consideration of Bo Diddley sits beside a treatise on “Difficult Ways to Publish Poetry;” there are jokes and lists and disease and spot-on aphorisms that sidestep true/false to become their own category of being. What makes A Handbook essential? The quality of writing, the shape of its thoughts, and the spaces of freedom it encourages in us as participants and co-conspirators. To read Anne Boyer is to join an underdog collectivity, “both always in this world and looking for another.”
— Jace Clayton
Sometimes it seems that we are defeated by our very substance so we can celebrate our remains. Is this our fate? Or is it even more deadly and more numerous? Having been placed on trial and held there, in the twin intensities of love of poetry and hatred of the world, Anne Boyer’s essays meet disappointment with a succor forged in rage. Her writing is a balm and a bomb all its own.
— Fred Moten
While this book is often at moments serious and profound in its indictments of the self promoting seriousness of the thing we call poetry, what I love most about it is the way it takes its whimsy so seriously. And yet it isn’t all whimsy. Because cancer shows up too. And the travails of women writers. And also Langston Hughes on trial. And Mary J Blige too.
— Juliana Spahr

In the News

Anne Boyer wins a 2020 Windham Campbell Prize for Nonfiction
A Handbook of Disappointed Fate recommended by Lara Pawson as a 2019 summer book in TLS
Anne Boyer’s A Handbook of Disappointed Fate is a Finalist for the Firecracker Awards
A Handbook of Disappointed Fate reviewed by Negar Azimi in Frieze
Anne Boyer’s A Handbook of Disappointed Fate reviewed in Artforum
A Handbook of Disappointed Fate reviewed on N Plus One Magazine
Anne Boyer’s A Handbook of Disappointed Fate reviewed on Los Angeles Review of Books
Anne Boyer’s A Handbook of Disappointed Fate excerpted in Harper’s Magazine
Anne Boyer’s A Handbook of Disappointed Fate reviewed by Melissa Beck on The Book Binder’s Daughter
Anne Boyer’s A Handbook of Disappointed Fate reviewed in BOMB Magazine
Anne Boyer’s A Handbook of Disappointed Fate is a Paris Review Staff Pick
Anne Boyer’s A Handbook of Disappointed Fate reviewed on 3am

Links

Personal Website

Anne Boyer on the Poetry Foundation’s website

Videos of Readings

Excerpt

In that year made from the minutes of our senses, we held our cognitive after-the-flood. There we were the lambs appropriating the contents of the sky and the field for the lambs. The shadows formed by clouds were a literature. We heard love songs in the nearness of each other’s backs; we saw monuments in our shared perception of quivers. We knew what was above our heads not as hawk and not-hawk: we knew the air as the air.

Details

ISBN: 978-1-937027-92-6
, , 240pp, W:4.75in x H:7.25in
Publication Date: May 1, 2018