Don’t Bother

These poems mediate the contradiction between our public and private personas, what we espouse, and how we actually live our lives. They explore the nature of long friendship-the moments of closeness and distance and finally its unraveling. This book is a dive into the depths of grief with an attempt to understand the complexities and complicities of relationships. It will not disappoint.-Terri DrakeWhere do friends go when they die? What if you cared more about a gone friend than she sometimes seemed to care about herself? What is a self, when all is, if not said, anyway done? Mortality is the gravitational field that gives these questions-gives elegies (and all poems, really)-their weight. Without death, there would be no poetry; prose, and its sequential logic, would be enough. Prose presumes a tomorrow that resembles today, but death puts the shatter to that complacency, leaving those still for the moment alive to pick up the pieces. Dion Farquhar has cultivated the habit of parsing the spectacle and adventure of life into significant details, accumulating quivers of synecdoches that lend themselves perfectly to her montage method of composition. Confronted with the detritus of a life, plethora is the easy way out, but grief abhors an indiscriminate- which is to say, a trivializing-abundance. In these poems chronicling a forty-plus-year friendship with a pioneering feminist, Farquhar refuses to eulogize, to indulge in obvious emotions and conventional lyricism, to dishonor the heady fervors of younger, fiercer days when youth could still feel like an accomplishment (not the gift it actually is) and an ameliorated future seemed eminently achievable, if only one thought-and fought-hard enough. Much of the pathos in this sequence comes from the (largely implied but never absent) contrast between the crystalline theoretical acuities of a deeply engaged professor and her later thralldom to the pervasive patriarchal subjugations she worked so passionately to dispel. In many of the poems, Farquhar, though talking to herself, is also addressing Mandy, the deceased friend, as if she were still alive-as if a life is never beyond revision, as if the chivvying and chiding and cheering on we lavish on those we care about might last for eternity.-Jeffrey Gustavson