My Unbirthday

Dear B, the card read, Happy Unbirthday! I thought you might be interested in the ghosts that haunt a fellow Pennsylvanian. Kate is now a colleague of mine.

When your birthday is in April and you receive an unbirthday gift in September, you are stopped in your tracks. When the gift comes from Alyson Hagy, a friend of whom I've written here before (her books—Graveyard of the Atlantic, Keeneland, and Snow, Ashes—on my shelves; her gifts to me strewn across the window sills of my house; her words of wisdom and weather a boon in my life), you pay careful attention.

The gift in question was a book of poems, back through interruption. The Kate was Kate Northrop, who has joined Alyson at the University of Wyoming, which has knit together (very much under Alyson's influence) one of the most exciting literature programs in the country, featuring teachers such as Brad Watson and Harvey Hix and Alyson herself, not to mention a cast of extraordinary visiting writers—Michael Ondaatje, Joy Williams, James Salter, Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, Art Spiegelman, Sigrid Nunez, and Dorothy Allison among them.

The point is: Alyson knows literature, she knows talent, her ear is adept. back through interruption is, I have discovered in these intervening days, a marvel—an exquisite parlaying of image and idea, a masterful jumbling of time. In poem after poem, Northrop turns incident into narrative, supposition into something that feels absolute and true. She gives you lines like this:

It was too urgent being human.

and this:

They are making matchbooks speak.

and:

...Is it
your business

after all, where a garden
winds up?

This is a book with which one settles in. This is a friendship for which I'm grateful.