{"id":2653,"date":"2011-04-20T20:57:04","date_gmt":"2011-04-21T00:57:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books\/?p=2653"},"modified":"2011-04-20T20:57:04","modified_gmt":"2011-04-21T00:57:04","slug":"see-me-improving-by-travis-nicholscopper-canyon-press-2010","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/see-me-improving-by-travis-nicholscopper-canyon-press-2010\/","title":{"rendered":"See Me Improving by Travis NicholsCopper Canyon Press, 2010"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I didn&#8217;t particularly like this book after my first reading of it: it seemed somehow both too strange and too ordinary, with more humor and less beauty than I like the poetry I read to have, but I decided to give it another try. It&#8217;s a short book, and maybe part of my problem the first time around was that the subway is perhaps not the most conducive reading atmosphere for an unfamiliar book of poems: too many distractions. I did like it more the second time through, though there is still plenty of strangeness (&#8220;so paddle with vacuous cheer\/into your fat bottle of pink soda and I will plunge\/into some sunny buttocks with the grace of God&#8217;s eraser&#8221; &#8211; in &#8220;A Poem from Bled,&#8221; a slightly different version of which appears <a href=\"http:\/\/www.octopusmagazine.com\/Issue01\/Templates\/travis_nichols_text.html\">here<\/a>) and ordinariness (a poem about drunkenly texting one&#8217;s friends on a bus ride, just to say you&#8217;re drunk). But there are also poems whose strangeness somehow entirely works, like <a href=\"http:\/\/poetrypill.blogspot.com\/2009\/12\/wild-is-wind.html\">&#8220;Wild Is the Wind&#8221;<\/a>. And there are bits of beauty, like this, from the start of &#8220;On the 730th Day God Made Me Happy,&#8221; which I think is my favorite poem in the whole book:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I dreamt we fell in love.<br \/>\nYou bought new sheets for the bed<br \/>\nand made dinner from breadcrumbs<br \/>\nand yellow squash. The red-fringed ivy bobbed<br \/>\nas the wind touched it,<br \/>\nstirring the building to feel. (27)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I didn&#8217;t particularly like this book after my first reading of it: it seemed somehow both too strange and too ordinary, with more humor and less beauty than I like the poetry I read to have, but I decided to give it another try. It&#8217;s a short book, and maybe part of my problem the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2653\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}