The endpapers are painted a visceral pinkish-red, and on the very first page I wrote, in block-capital black letters, “I AM A LITTLE WORLD MADE CUNNINGLY/OF ELEMENTS, AND AN ANGELIKE SPRITE”-the first two lines of Donne’s Holy Sonnet V. One English class required us to undertake a kind of self-expressive art project I made an “altered book” full of quotations, postcards, photos cut out from magazines, abstract designs. When a friend of mine killed himself the summer before my junior year (lower sixth, in English parlance, or year twelve I was sixteen), Donne’s refusal to look away from the realities of death and desire were something of a life raft. That copy also included some excerpts from his sermons, including the famous “No man is an island” section.
Later in high school, I procured a copy of his prose work Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, written when he believed himself near death. I can’t remember where I first encountered his work, but I became steadily more fascinated by it throughout high school: the close-reading techniques with which American pedagogy of the mid-2000s chose to teach poetry to teenagers lent themselves to the knotty syntax and sometimes shocking metaphors of his love poems.
John Donne has been in my top five-no, top two-poets of all time since I was about fourteen. April 2023: superlatives for the rest of it.Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs.The Great Reread, #6: Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer.May 2023: superlatives for the rest of it.
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