These Are A Few of My Least Favorite Things - Shannon Frost Greenstein
Description:
Spiders. Cancer. Civil war in Syria. Frankly, there are a lot of awful things out there in the world, and most of them aren't fair. But life is so much more than its disasters and grief…and everyone knows that poetry is a balm. These Are a Few of My Least Favorite Things is an account of everything we tend to hate, a deeply personal reflection on trauma and mental illness and the evil clowns who haunt our dreams. It is also an exploration of what we can do with the circumstances we are given; it is a search for gratitude in spite of the pain. By illustrating the many kinds of darkness, this collection ultimately strives to find true sources of light…because for every one of our least favorite things, there is an equal and opposite favorite to love.
Praise:
These Are a Few of My Least Favorite Things is a book that begins--literally--with "a spark" that Shannon Frost Greenstein breathes into a fire that's half hearth, half inferno, and always illuminating. Unflinching and authentic, whether interrogating a history of personal trauma or the poisons of capitalism, Greenstein's poems show us how being a witness to suffering is to become an accessory to suffering, that the pain we internalize becomes what we know foremost about ourselves. "I inhabit -- flawlessly and with surprise -- the character of my own body" Greenstein writes, and it's true: how flawlessly we inhabit our flaws. But then--as Greenstein shows over and over--how wonderful to rise from the wreckage of ourselves and know goodness, beauty, and righteousness. "Today, / I lived and / tomorrow / I will live again."
- Todd Dillard, author of Ways We Vanish, finalist for the 2021 Balcones Poetry Award
These Are a Few of My Least Favorite Things is an ambitious book with a lot of heart. It tackles numerous injustices: child molestation, homelessness, the opioid crisis, and cancer, to name a few. Every page is thick with emotion, booming with Greenstein’s clamor for necessary compassion and change. She does not let you turn away for a moment.
- Lannie Stabile, author of Good Morning to Everyone Except Men Who Name Their Dogs Zeus
Hold on . . . I'm still picking my jaw up off the floor. Greenstein's poetry debut These Are a Few of My Least Favorite Things bursts with personality, confidence, wit, and diarylike confession. Her ability as a fiction and nonfiction author lends a postmordern dimension to this innovative and eclectic collection which examines culture, illness, and empathy, breaking every poetry rule in a way rarely seen since William Carlos Williams' Paterson. Playful with tone, theme, and form, the reader encounters the unexpected again and again, never diminishing in its payoff. Though the net Greenstein casts is wide, we never lose sight of the overall quest, in triumphing over our current situation's darkness and finding hope. Yet another stellar achievement by Shannon Greenstein.
—Jonathan Koven, author of Below Torrential Hill and Palm Lines
