The unreality of memory And other essays

In this deeply contemplative but accessible essay collection, poet Gabbert (The Word Pretty) considers how accurately people perceive themselves and the world around them. She begins, in "Magnificent Desolation," by considering the spectacle of catastrophe, using the uneasy fascination people have with events such as 9/11 and the sinking of the Titanic to suggest that "horror and awe are not incompatible; they are intertwined." In "Vanity Project," Gabbert reflects on how people perceive their mirror images: are such images "real," or are they "mirror delusions" in which one only sees what one expects to see? In her most involved and layered essay, "Witches and Whiplash," she delves deep into the history of psychogenic (mentally originating) and psychosomatic (both body and mind) disorders. In a fitting epilogue, Gabbert discusses French philosopher Henri Bergson, who "believed that memory and perception were the same" and famously debated Einstein on the nature of time, leading Gabbert to wonder whether lived experience is distorted not by unreliable memory but by an unreliable perception of the present. Whatever the chosen topic, Gabbert's essays manage to be by turns poetic, philosophical, and exhaustively researched. This is a superb collection. (Aug.)

In her second collection of nonfiction, poet Gabbert moves fluidly from disaster to dislocation to political upheaval, offering a kind of literary road map to our tumultuous era. In the epilogue the author writes, "it feels like a suspended emergency--like the specious present has been extended in both directions. Now feels longer." How do we read such a reflection without thinking about this current moment? Yet Gabbert began the book in 2016, so the narrative is haunted by the specter of the president rather than the specter of the pandemic--although the two are, of course, intimately related. For the author, the key question is how to remain present and connected, how not to turn away from the disruption of the world. To frame her inquiry, she divides the book into three parts, the first about disaster (human-made and otherwise), the second about memory and self-perception, and the last about exhaustion and social conditioning. Her questing, restless intelligence is what holds the essays together. "Real life is not like fiction," she insists, citing Errol Morris. We can never know enough, and usually, we are at the mercy of what we don't know. Gabbert makes that explicit in her writing, which is digressive and discursive, showing its bones. "The Great Mortality" begins with a subtle change in the author's ability to taste, which she thought was viral, before shifting into a series of reflections on contagion and apocalypse. In "The Little Room (or, The Unreality of Memory)," Gabbert uses the memory of her grandmother's den to provoke a wide-ranging examination of memory and its unreliability, ending with a vivid evocation of loss. "It's hard for me to believe it no longer exists," she writes, recalling that long-lost home; "it's not a place I can go to." The idea here--as in all the essays in this nuanced book--is that consciousness is conditional, and we can understand ourselves only in pieces. A fine collection from a poet who seems equally comfortable in prose. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.