That Kind of Happy - (Phoenix Poets) by Maggie Dietz (Paperback)

About the Book

Happiness, Jonathan Swift wrote, is the quality of being well-deceived. In this long-awaited second collection, Maggie Dietz investigates our sometimes near-sighted notions of happiness, interweaving loss and motherhood, the death of a parent, and the persistence of hope, in poems that are characteristically sharp-eyed, varied, and evocative. Her first book published in the series did unusually well, with positive reviews in prominent publications. In this new collection, Dietz does what Phoenix Poets poets do best: write beautiful poems on difficult subjects, looking head-on at problems and situations that a clever turn in a poetic line won t necessarily solve. The book is, in the words of one of our readers, a bracing, various pleasure to read. "

Book Synopsis

October Aubade

If I slept too long, forgive me.

A north wind quickened the window frames
so the room pitched like a moving train

and the pillow's whiff of hickory
and shaving soap conjured your body

beside me. So I slept in the berth
as the train chuffed on, unburdened

by waking's cold water, ignorant
of pain, estrangement, hunger and

the crucial fuel the boiler burned
to keep the minutes' pistons churning

while I slept. Forgive me.

That Kind of Happy, the long-awaited second collection by award-winning poet Maggie Dietz, explores the sharp, profound tension between a disquieted inner life and quotidian experience. Central to the book are poems that take up two major life events: becoming a mother and losing a father within a short stretch of time. Here, at the intersection of joy and grief, of persistence and attrition, Dietz wrestles with the questions posed by such conflicting experiences, revealing a mind suspicious of quick fixes and dissatisfied with easy answers. The result is a book as anguished as it is distinguished.

Review Quotes

"Just ordinary everyday experiences. Death, for instance, oh and a child gets his fingers acetoned by a toothbrush for trying to help a wounded expiring bird, its 'Black eyes visible through skeins / of lids, ' its 'soft pink belly like a clam.' And there's the 'gossamer ice' of a frozen river, like 'bright / metal hammered fine as the / ghost of the ghost of a moon.' And the birth of a baby, 'every one / of its live cells singing / Hosanna for "we praise / you" and "please save / us" as being trains its / way into the lighted room. . . .' Things like that. Everyday instances. All these extraordinary human things, the pleasure and the pain, sung about in a versification which is a radiant celebratory light shining on them."--David Ferry

"Dietz often makes the ordinary world interesting by being dissatisfied with it. . . . There's wariness here about invention, the fear of sham happiness, in consort with the sense that some activity, some making, must be offered up in order for happiness to be earned. Those conflicting imperatives frequently register in the intricate energy of Dietz's descriptions, which are often sonically dense, carefully lineated, grammatically complex, and observed with imaginative precision."-- "Slate"

About the Author

Maggie Dietz is the author of Perennial Fall, also published by the University of Chicago Press, and coeditor of Americans' Favorite Poems, Poems to Read, and An Invitation to Poetry. She teaches at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.