Book description
Things Come On is a broken and sutured hybrid of forms, combining
poetry, prose narration, primary documents, dramatic dialogue, and
pictures. The narrative is woven around the almost exact concurrence of
the Watergate scandal and the dates of the poet's mother's illness and
death from breast cancer, and weaves together private and public
tragedies--showing how the language of illness and of political cover-up
powerfully resonate with one another. The resulting "amneoir"
(a blend of "memoir" and "amnesia") explores a time
for which the author must rely largely on testimony and documentary
evidence--not unlike the Congress and the nation did during the same
period. Absences, amnesia, and silences count for at least as much as
words. As the double tragedy unfolds, it refuses to become part of an
overarching system, metaphor, or metanarrative, but rather raises
questions of memory and evidence, gender and genre, personal and
political, and expert vs. lay language. This haunting experimental
biography challenges our assumptions about the distance between
individual experience and history. A reader's companion is available at
http://thingscomeonreader. site. wesleyan. edu/ "It is seldom
that a book reviewer comes upon a book so genuinely different from any
other as this 'amneoir.' That it should also be so very accomplished, so
successful in the original row it has chosen to hoe, is an enormous
achievement for Mr. Harrington, who deserves high praise for the very
difficult task he set for himself and then so movingly bringing it to
fruition."--Martin Rubin, The Washington Times JOSEPH HARRINGTON
is an associate professor of English at the University of Kansas and the
author of Poetry and the Public.
