31-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Is this book a breakup memoir? A murder mystery? Both?
Almost two decades ago, while I was trying to find my footing as a writer — roving between the provinces of prose and poetry — I picked up 'The Poetry Home Repair Manual' by Ted Kooser, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who served as poet laureate of the United States from 2004 to 2006. In the years since, I've often pulled it down from my bookshelf to reread one line: 'A carefully controlled metaphor, like any clearly observed association of two dissimilar things or events, can excite the responses of readers because it gives them a glimpse of an order that they might not otherwise have become aware of.'
