First, there is the sheer joy of the trip. “Few poets seem to have more fun than Patience Agbabi” writes Stephanie Burt about the shapeshifting poetic energy of Patience Agbabi’s Transformatrix. Vanessa Smith loves that there is “something Zen” in A Life of One’s Own, but she also delights in “lively hedonism” that Marion Milner chronicles: her experiments with “new dances and clothes, jazz clubs and ping-pong, sleeping under the stars and nude sunbathing.” The sculptor Joe Brainard, in I Remember, makes word collages out of everything from rocks and wine to fold-out trays: Andrew Miller concludes that “part of the pleasure comes from listening for the harmonics of the thing, the way that the memories work together and apart, never giving you everything but always giving you something.”
Underneath that joy, something more serious can also be afoot. John Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing seduces readers into gazing down into a deadly but awe-inspiring river, “a deep but transparent greenish brown, … flow[ing] past in thick ropes and sheeted wedges, in shapes that changed with an incredible complexity before his gaze.” And Theo Davis’s celebration of Satomi Myodo (who disarmingly explains “I wanted to know why I was such bad wood”) sums up the book’s greatness in her unforgettable opening line: “As spiritual autobiographies go, Journey in Search of the Way is a bit of a romp.”