If Men, Then: Poems

by Eliza Griswold

Overview

A darkly humorous new collection of poems by the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author of Wideawake Field and Amity and Prosperity

If Men, Then, Eliza Griswold’s second poetry collection, charts a radical spiritual journey through catastrophe. Griswold’s language is forthright and intimate as she steers between the chaos of a tumultuous inner world and an external landscape littered with SUVs, CBD oil, and go bags, talismans of our time. Alternately searing and hopeful, funny and fraught, the poems explore the world’s fracturing through the collapse of the ego, embodied in a character named “I”—a soul attempting to wrestle with itself in the face of an unfolding tragedy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374280772
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	02/11/2020
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	1,184,480
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Eliza Griswold is the author of an acclaimed first book of poems, Wideawake Field, as well as The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam, which won the 2011 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize. Her translations of Afghan women’s folk poems, I Am the Beggar of the World, was awarded the 2015 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She has held fellowships from the New America Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and Harvard University, and in 2010 the American Academy in Rome awarded her the Rome Prize for her poems. Griswold, currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University, is also the author of Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, which was named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2018, one of The Washington Post’s 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction for 2018, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction in 2019.

Table of Contents

Prayer

1

Prelude to a Massacre
Goodbye, Mullah Omar
Kaliyuga
Host
Friday Afternoon with Boko Haram
Gaia
Pulling Out
Water Table
On Wearing a Tracking Device
Habeas Corpus
Ruins
Geographic
Lampedusa
Early Middle Ages

2 / FIRST PERSON

i. Reflect ii. There Is No We in Kaliyuga iii. Netherworld Weathergirl iv. Testing v. Green vi. A Rock Rolled Out of Bed vii. Hurt People viii. Of Empty Heaven and Its Hymns ix. Bembix x. Old School xi. The Morning After xii. Survival: A User’s Guide xiii. Singer Futura xiv. Cookie xv. Towed

3

Ode to the People of Melos
Gone the Lofty Days of Pericles
Libyan Proverbs
Ode to the Dead Journalist
Baker’s Tomb, 30 BC
Waiting for the Volcano
Remedy
Apotheosis
Circus Maximus
Sabaudia
Asma
Snow in Rome
No Mother Is Good Enough
Renunciation
Shieldmaiden

4

Tree,
Geographic II
Inner Émigré
Arion and the Dolphin
Love Poem for a Mature Audience
Slough
Ode to Thucydides
Key West
Little Gidding
What If the Apocalypse Were Sudden
Metamorphosis
High Above All Nations
Elephant
Toward a New Year

Notes
Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

12/16/2019

Pulitzer-winning journalist Griswold (Amity and Prosperity) examines the relationship between toxic masculinity, violence, and the creation of public narrative in her incisive poetry debut. Griswold suggests that the conventions of storytelling incite and erase violence against historically marginalized people: “Twenty men crossing a bridge,/ into a village,/ is not a metaphor/ but prelude to a massacre,” she warns. She highlights the way language distances viewers from the escalating violence that floods the news, suggesting various power structures inform which stories are told, and which elicit sympathy: “The Fox News guy slipping his phone number/ over the anchor’s desk,/ below the camera’s eye;/ the radio host calling her a failure for/ becoming a mother.” Griswold presents the news as inextricable from traditional beliefs about gender and power. Yet the speaker of these poems, “eager to share any awful story,” frequently calls attention to the variability of beliefs about storytelling, and it is in this instability that she discovers agency, hope, and the possibility of redemption. She writes, as though describing the movement of the poems themselves: “She was warden of an angry garden,/ guarding against what hoped to grow.” This well-timed exploration of violence and language is an exciting introduction to Griswold’s work. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"Griswold has taken the Whitmanesque 'I'—'I' as everyone—and made it unmistakably singular . . . Though the sequence nods to the surreal and the psychological—Rimbaud’s 'Je est un autre'—there are also echoes of John Berryman and Sylvia Plath, poets closer to home whose self-awareness was enacted on the page in the form of characters, masks, new selves . . . wry and intimate, sophisticated and all [Griswold's] own—imagining the adventure that is being." —Kevin Young, The New Yorker

"This second poetry collection from Griswold is profoundly of its moment (just look at the CBD oil references), but its language feels somehow eternal." —Emma Specter, Vogue

"[Griswold] writes poems so emotionally charged they seem on the verge of spilling over . . . palpable and provocative poems that can be appreciated by broad audience." —Karla Huston, Library Journal

From the Publisher

01/01/2020

A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist perhaps best known for The Tenth Parallel, Griswold is also an accomplished poet. Her first collection, Wideawake Field, examined our shattered world, and she subsequently won a PEN translation award for I Am the Beggar of the World, which compiled Afghan women's folk poems. Here she retains that engaged sensibility as she writes poems so emotionally charged they seem on the verge of spilling over. Often, her poems occupy spaces in refugee camps or at border crossings—"What can we offer the child/ at the border: a river of shoes,/ her coat stitched with coins,/ her father killed for his teeth"—and many bear witness to destruction, whether though battle or ignorance. There is also concern for the planet's degradation: "Rats/ in the wheel wells, always rats and sickness, …and skies/ now empty of starlings, wheel themselves." But Griswold also seems to be in search of a self who may be searching for a self: "I is a lion/ who snarls/ at the lion/ in the water/ who snarls." And there is humor: "Exodus is a traffic jam/ and traffic jams are dangerous." VERDICT Palpable and provocative poems that can be appreciated by broad audience.—Karla Huston, Appleton, WI

Library Journal

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