Review copy provided by the publisher.
Dear Mike,
I read the poems in this, and bits of the prose, in your handwriting. You know I’ve read it before. And now here it is, it’s a real book (with glue!), and you’re gone, you’re so far from us I can’t wrap my mind around it. (Neither can Neil, you can tell from the introduction he wrote for you.) And I read the first of the poems that I remembered in your handwriting, and I thought, all right, I can do this, and I got to the first two paragraphs, about the timing and manner of a person’s death, and Mike, I broke down sobbing again.
You always do that.
A lot of stuff I’ve spent the last fifteen years saying I want more of in books is in this book. Trains! Parliaments (and other forms of government that are not monarchies)! Friendships of all shapes and sizes and ages! Disability representation of more than one kind! People who have hobbies and still have intense life work and relationships! And now I will be able to point people at this and say yes, this, this is actually what I meant. I mean, other things too. But this, this is what I was talking about.
This is the thing that you said to us over your shoulder from the doorway as you were leaving, and I’ve been calling down the hall after you since, and now, and now…other people can hear at least some of your part of the conversation.
It’s so clear that you knew here–as in all your other books–that you wouldn’t have much time. There is so much of this book that knows that time is short, so damnably short. And there is also so much of this book that is clear that you thought you’d have more time than this, and it’s so unfair, it’s so unfair, I can see the shape of where you were going, not just with the touchstone sonnets at the end but the worldbuilding, even just small moments like the conversation about which characters learn which second languages in which countries–this is a shape of continental politics that is moving, and I can see the pieces on the game board, I watch their shadows, but the details matter, Mike, the colors matter, and this book has so much color.
Now there isn’t any book of yours I haven’t read at least twice.
Now there isn’t any book of yours I haven’t pressed on people, saying, here, you can read it, you should read it, it’s full of people making things and wrestling with their better selves and asking questions, finding spaces where they can breathe more easily and people who help them do it. There is a moment where one character asks of another, “who is he?” and the answer comes, “Someone who will leave Lescoray a better place, if he can only find the time.”
Time was so short but you did find so much of it for that. I wish you could have given us all of this. But it is so good, so good to have what there is of it, here, in my hands, where I can share it around, where in addition to shouting down the passage after you, I can turn to the person just coming in and say, “whew, that poem that came with Agate’s sculpture, right? RIGHT???” And they can know. They can finally know.
Thanks for this final gift, my friend.