Schomburg, Zachary. The Man Suit. Boston: Black Ocean, 2007.

This is the second poetry book I've read this summer and the second poetry book I've read in almost two years. It's the first poetry book I've read this week, which puts me way ahead of a. in terms of his new reading resolution. This is the first full-length poetry book published by my new officemate, who just this afternoon bullied me into updating this blog. I'm teaching this book in November, but I thought I'd finish it now so I can have time to mull it over. Why am I deciding to teach all these books I can't figure out how to teach? The reason I'll never be a good literature professor is that my pedagogical stance begins and ends with Read This Isn't It Good Yeah God I Loved It Cool.

All this by way of background.

Zach's book seems to place itself somewhere near the difference between impersonation and impostorism. Impostory? Imposture? I think an impersonator is someone we reward for resembling another person, or if not "reward" then "are entertained by." An impostor is someone whose resemblance of another person is not to be trusted and is perhaps to be punished. So the question, given the title of the book, seems to be whether the business of social existence is an impersonation of some true self (maybe put that in quotes) or an act of imposture. And if we're impostors who's not to trust what we're doing? Who's to punish us?

There's a good poem in it (there are lots but there's also this one) called "I'm Not Carlos", Carlos being a character that pops up from time to time. He's like an impostor of the speaker of all the poems even though the speaker doesn't seem to know about it, I think because he's too busy wondering whether he himself isn't an impersonator. "Sometimes [the tree machines] call me on the telephone and whisper things," he says in this poem. "Give us the man suit, Carlos. Just give us the man suit."

Later we're told that calls asking for Carlos are the only calls the speaker gets anymore.

I think what I'll need to do is somehow convert my classroom between the time we discuss Zadie Smith's (check the initials) On Beauty and the time we discuss this book into the kind of space where people feel comfortable letting meaning elude them. What's hard about that is that I'm not comfortable letting meaning elude me. There are puzzles to solve! There are impressive scores to achieve on standardized tests!

(One thing I've completely failed to talk about is how funny this book is. How do you talk about something being funny without putting across the idea that it's just funny? Or that it's like "a humorous book"?)