Unusual and affecting ...

... the broken elegy - bookforum.com / current issue. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

... The Two Kinds of Decay delivers conventional emotional and narrative satisfactions, each chapter built around an anecdote or observation or topic (steroids, desk calendars, secrets), and the chapters accumulating into a mosaic that feels aesthetically whole. The Guardians, on the other hand, ruminates compulsively on suicide and what Manguso calls “the black box of a forsaken mind.” Her own history of depression and suicidal ideation stands behind the litany of other deaths she offers up. With the writer and performer Spalding Gray’s fatal jump from the Staten Island ferry, Manguso writes, “I’d advanced one lurid death closer to my own.” And after a colleague, a poet, dies from a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head, Manguso states: “Afterward I felt an echo of that old feeling—that the line was moving, that I was now one death closer to the threshold—but it was a faint echo. I’ve felt insulated from my death since I began taking this new medicine. I am no longer moved to write poetry, but I traded poetry for a longer life.”