MY FEELINGS, BY NICK FLYNN
For Nick Flynn fans, the title of his newest collection may feel gleefully inevitable. What else could it be named but My Feelings? Few poets in recent memory have mined the battlefields of adolescence and family history as well or as candidly as Nick Flynn—this collection is no exception.
With three memoirs to his name, the content treads familiar territory, but My Feelings recasts these events through a lens of intense self-awareness and humor. In “Put the Load on Me,” Flynn writes: “Earlier, a deer stood by the side of the road / Deciding whether or not to kill me. I cannot / blame her, I cannot blame anyone—many / animals were hurt in the production of this book / just as many trees were hurt & all / the clouds.”
In a collection that draws largely on his personal life and the recent passing of his father, Flynn avoids solipsism by looking outward—“Open any book / & the cloud above you bursts into / flame, you know this & yet nothing / stops you, the sky stuck to the end of your finger / as you point to it.”
