REVIEW
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood:
Kate Angus' So Late to the Party | Dorothy Chan
So Late to the Party by Kate Angus
Negative Capability Press, 2016 (69 pages)
ISBN: 9780942544367
Negative Capability Press, 2016 (69 pages)
ISBN: 9780942544367
Kate Angus writes with such an awareness and consciousness of today's writers' world. In her debut collection, So Late to the Party, she mixes the everyday conversational and Generation Y with inspiration from literature, along with retorts toward the contemporary "life of the writer." This is what makes Angus' collection both resonant and relevant. Her opening poem is aptly titled, "Painters," and already, she brings Frank O'Hara into the equation: "and remembering the party,/a few days back when Dave said/he used to be a painter. Christine/asked why he stopped and he recited/O'Hara's "Why I Am Not A Painter/and we laughed. Good." This opening
fondly pokes fun at the writing world—it's such a cliché for a writer at a party to be quoting poetry, and yet, this is what writers do. And it is beautiful that Angus brings this to light. This continues with, "The poems are mostly/about love; lithographs made/after O'Hara's death. Don't/die, friends. Let's make a pact." Here, Angus' voice is conversational and charming. She also justly pays homage to O'Hara, thus inserting herself into the poetic tradition.
Angus takes this conversation and self-awareness into a broader scale. For instance, in "Last Call," Angus' speaker says,
That there's not a finite amount
of love and happiness here, and the world isn't really a cruel restaurant
where some of us are eternally emptying out pockets so lint falls out
like snow but we still can't seem to buy what we need,
while, at the next table, our friends
gorge on chilled oysters and swill rivers of champagne.
I love how Angus brings up the infinite amount of "love and happiness here," and her metaphor of the world as a "restaurant" is extremely clever. I believe that more poetry should bring out this worldly awareness-that, being a writer is a privilege, and that comparison kills. She also brings out practicality in this situation: "and not finding us grants or lovers who would actually love us/or jobs that fulfill us as human beings?" This is taking the romanticism out of the writer occupation, which I argue makes it sound more appealing. Angus is about work, and poets will not get work done if they continue to compare themselves and glorify the cliché of the "writer's misery."
This theme continues on an ecological level in "Complicity."
Also, on a side note, Angus' titles are effective because they are terse when necessary (in the case of "Complicity," "No Wonder," and "Intimacy") and long-winded when needed (in the case of "In the Award-Winning Movies in my Head, We are Infinitely Better Looking and Everything Makes Sense" and "If My Life Were a Radio, Lately I Would Prefer Another Station"). Back to "Complicity," Angus' speaker brings up guilt when looking at her leftover sausage pizza, and she compares that guilt to the feeling of looking at a fish dinner "resting/on a glazed blue plate garnished/with a slice of lemon/sickle-shaped and pale yellow/as the moon. The thing still swimming/in olive oil and herbs." Angus animates this guilt beautifully. It is not only a guilt that's transferred into a new image, but it also becomes an image that moves and "swims."
"Sonnet" is another lovely piece. This is the only sonnet in Angus' collection, and it seems to be a summation of everything in the book, presented in the most perfect form. The sonnet is a box filled with tension and release, and Angus fills her box with a message on actual literature: "If you live on the other side of the country,/we might as well inhabit pages—characters/who walk through chapters, not people/typing messages to each other in rooms." But then this critique delves into the erotic with images of the red and white of hotel rooms. Angus adds sexiness to this sonnet, and we definitely want our writing to exude that passion.
Yet, Angus ends her collection on a note of tenderness. In "I Do Not Want to Lose Anybody," she reminisces about kindergarten, high school, and college, and ends with "I will eat olives: each one a world plucked from the brine." We can picture her speaker all alone, finding amusement in the ordinary—finding the world in the ordinary. This is the power of Angus' collection, making the reader not want to be late to her party.
Angus takes this conversation and self-awareness into a broader scale. For instance, in "Last Call," Angus' speaker says,
That there's not a finite amount
of love and happiness here, and the world isn't really a cruel restaurant
where some of us are eternally emptying out pockets so lint falls out
like snow but we still can't seem to buy what we need,
while, at the next table, our friends
gorge on chilled oysters and swill rivers of champagne.
This theme continues on an ecological level in "Complicity."
Also, on a side note, Angus' titles are effective because they are terse when necessary (in the case of "Complicity," "No Wonder," and "Intimacy") and long-winded when needed (in the case of "In the Award-Winning Movies in my Head, We are Infinitely Better Looking and Everything Makes Sense" and "If My Life Were a Radio, Lately I Would Prefer Another Station"). Back to "Complicity," Angus' speaker brings up guilt when looking at her leftover sausage pizza, and she compares that guilt to the feeling of looking at a fish dinner "resting/on a glazed blue plate garnished/with a slice of lemon/sickle-shaped and pale yellow/as the moon. The thing still swimming/in olive oil and herbs." Angus animates this guilt beautifully. It is not only a guilt that's transferred into a new image, but it also becomes an image that moves and "swims."
"Sonnet" is another lovely piece. This is the only sonnet in Angus' collection, and it seems to be a summation of everything in the book, presented in the most perfect form. The sonnet is a box filled with tension and release, and Angus fills her box with a message on actual literature: "If you live on the other side of the country,/we might as well inhabit pages—characters/who walk through chapters, not people/typing messages to each other in rooms." But then this critique delves into the erotic with images of the red and white of hotel rooms. Angus adds sexiness to this sonnet, and we definitely want our writing to exude that passion.
Yet, Angus ends her collection on a note of tenderness. In "I Do Not Want to Lose Anybody," she reminisces about kindergarten, high school, and college, and ends with "I will eat olives: each one a world plucked from the brine." We can picture her speaker all alone, finding amusement in the ordinary—finding the world in the ordinary. This is the power of Angus' collection, making the reader not want to be late to her party.
Dorothy Chan was a 2014 finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbird,
Plume, Spillway, and The Great American Poetry Show. In 2012, The Writing Disorder nominated her poem, "Ikebukuro Train Rides" for a Pushcart.