You better be lightning - book review(s)
January poetry book chat and where we go next.
Our first poetry book club discussion, here we go!
In January we have been reading, You Better Be Lightning by Andrea Gibson, published by Button Poetry.
Shall I start us off?
I started reading this book and found I was holding my breath.
I read out loud, whether I meant to or not.
Sometimes the words ran away from me and after chasing them down I would force a retracing of my steps. It took force because oh-my-goodness does this book make you want to read on and on.
I underlined quotes to go back and unpick slowly like the bobbles off a favourite knitted jumper that you know will be so much the better for it if only you can persist. I have a lot of jumpers waiting for me:
“If we never deny the inevitable end of the story, we will write it more beautiful while we’re alive.” p21
“It’s what we do - turn our bodies into museums of what was broken.” p14
“I don’t aim to be a person of note. I aim to be a person of whole journals filled with stories about hitchhiking the Atlantic coast.” p88
Someone stop me now.
The paper felt good. And the font. I thought it held the poems precisely.
I found it a romantic read at times but not without plenty of sucker punches. I would say it was hard to read in places (it really was) but actually even the hard lines had a softness, a forgiveness about them, an deep undercurrent of love. The bit about their girlfriend’s father bursting in after the show had me in pieces. The poems about climate change likewise, for different and the same reasons. I felt like I was being told these stories firsthand. Like they held truths that I wanted to listen to with my full attention. I still think, ‘Acceptance speech after setting the world record in goosebumps’ is my favourite.
Towards the end I held my breath even more. Then I let it out.
It is a book I will read again and again. I loved it.
Book club chat:
How about you? Did you have a favourite poem from the book? Any reflections on the book as a whole. Any questions you would want ask to others?
Shall we chat in the comments?
Oh and Andrea Gibson does write a brilliant Substack - Things that don’t suck, if you’ve not discovered that yet.
I have been musing on whether a poetry book club works. Mainly because I don’t tend to read poetry books cover to cover. Do you? I don’t like to be rushed. But then again, I do also value the nudge to read that way, because it can lead to a different reading can’t it? And I have 100% read more poetry as a result. And I LOVE the idea of treating myself to a new poetry book each month, ha. So…dunno.
From next month, if we do carry on with book club I see it becoming a paid subscriber thing so I’ve done a few polls for community members, including one where we can choose our next book if we fancy going again…
(If you want to join the community but for whatever reason can’t afford it right now please just message me and I’ll sort that out. You don’t need to explain why.)
And if we do decide to go again (I’ll be led by your votes), shall we choose a book together? Here are some that have been recommended over the last few weeks:
Sorry the poll doesn’t give me the space to write the full title and author, but you hopefully have enough detail to look them up.
I want to read ALL these books. Looking forward to seeing which one is the favourite. I’ll let you know the results in a couple of days so we can get cracking.
Ok, back to January, You Better Be Lightning. Did you read it? What did you think?
Nelly
x
I’m so glad you chose this book! I’d avoided Andrea’s work because I was scared it would be too sad - and they floored me a few pages in with the line “five minutes into our first conversation you knew I could take a punch better than I could take a compliment”. There is some incredibly hard reading in this book but there is also so much joy and humour and strength and power. It is lightning.
I’ve just finished it and I loved it soooo much. I tried to eke it out and savour it for as long as possible, but I know it’s something I will return to again and again.
Hard to pick favourites as most of the poems had lines that took my breath away, but I loved the opening poem “Acceptance speech...”
And this line in Time Piece ”No matter how it looks, you and everyone you know/ have hourglass figures. Each breath, a falling grain of sand. “
I thought there were so many beautiful lines like this that captured the fragility of life and the need to live it to the full and feel all the emotions at the same time.
The Test of Time summed this up for me, and I loved this section
“I wake up every morning and see, if I can still wiggle my toes, and I dance
in my pajamas before I brush my teeth, and I pray
to a different god every single day because I pray to me
and sometimes I’m clear and sometimes I’m scattered
as the ashes of my friends who were still alive last year”
Oof. Lines like this just hit like a punch in the stomach and made me well up instantly.
Thank you so much for bringing Andrea’s work to my attention. ❤️