{"id":6116,"date":"2014-04-27T19:03:18","date_gmt":"2014-04-27T23:03:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books\/?p=6116"},"modified":"2014-04-27T19:03:18","modified_gmt":"2014-04-27T23:03:18","slug":"i-dont-want-to-be-crazy-by-samantha-schutzpush-scholastic-2006","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/i-dont-want-to-be-crazy-by-samantha-schutzpush-scholastic-2006\/","title":{"rendered":"I Don’t Want to Be Crazy by Samantha SchutzPUSH (Scholastic), 2006"},"content":{"rendered":"

The prologue\/first poem in I Don’t Want to Be Crazy<\/em>, Samantha Schutz’s YA memoir in free verse about getting through college while coping with an anxiety disorder, narrates the experience of having a panic attack:<\/p>\n

My hands are shaking.
\nI try to squeeze them, try to make it stop,
\nbut now my fists are shaking,
\nand this shaking is working its way through me. (1)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The rest of the book is divided into five parts, the first starting just before Schutz leaves for college and continuing to the end of her freshman year; each subsequent part corresponds to a year of college, except for the fifth, which is about Schutz’s life after graduation, until just after her 22nd birthday. Each part of the book is made of numbered sections, which are in turn made up of sections of free verse that often read like journal entries with line breaks. Schutz writes about the uncertainty and sense of possibility of starting college:<\/p>\n

\nIt’s crazy that I’m leaving
\neverything and everyone I know,
\nbut there are things I want to leave behind,
\nthings I don’t have room for —
\nlike this version of me, (5)\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The poems about daily life at college (Schutz went to Skidmore) are slice-of-life poems: figuring out school, and friends, and relationships, while also dealing with the frequent and debilitating experience of panic, and then the work, after being diagnosed with panic disorder, of trying to find stability through therapy and medication. Schutz’s story is raw and true, but I’m not sure that the free verse form is the best way to tell it. (Possibly this book also suffered a bit for me because I read it after having just finished a volume of poems by Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and also because I’m older than its intended audience.) I found myself thinking some of the poems would have worked as well or better as prose vignettes, without the line breaks: there were moments when it felt like Schutz was doing something with line breaks\/line length that added to the mood or meaning of the piece, but I wanted more from the poems, more imagery, more simile, more metaphor. (Again: this may be me reading as an adult reader who likes poetry, as opposed to a YA reader who may not like poetry at all, who may find a book like this to be his or her first experience of having poetry be something that feels alive and relevant.) <\/p>\n

I think the moments I like best in this book are the joyful ones, where Schutz is capturing moments of connection and delight, which, again, is partly my bias as a reader: I like reading about joy\/happiness\/sensual delight, and I like that those moments are descriptive and outwardly focused, that they give me images to grab on to, rather than being about the experience (which is clearly common for a person who has panic attacks) of feeling stuck in one’s body, stuck in one’s mind. I like bits like this:<\/p>\n

\nand we kiss in the grass
\nby one of the outdoor sculptures—
\ngiant yellow metal beams
\nthat look like reaching legs.
\nWe can hear laughing and cheering
\ncoming from the party across the green.
\nI feel like the cheering is for me,
\nfor us. (19)\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

or this:<\/p>\n

\nHe buys me a red Ring Pop and I think
\nit’s the best thing anyone’s ever given me.<\/p>\n

At his apartment he asks how the Ring Pop tastes
\nand when I say, “It tastes red,”
\nhe smiles and kisses me
\nto see for himself. (123)\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

or this:<\/p>\n

\nWe go swimming
\nand dive around each other
\nlike curious fish. (132)\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The prologue\/first poem in I Don’t Want to Be Crazy, Samantha Schutz’s YA memoir in free verse about getting through college while coping with an anxiety disorder, narrates the experience of having a panic attack: My hands are shaking. I try to squeeze them, try to make it stop, but now my fists are shaking, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-young-adultchildrens"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6116","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=6116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6116\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}