Staff Pick: David Doody

My pick this time around is an older book. The Meadow by the poet James Galvin was recommended to me by another great poet, Rick Barot. We were discussing nonfiction and I threw into the discussion Blues for Cannibals: The Notes from Underground by Charles Bowden. Rick responded with The Meadow, a meditative masterpiece on the history of a piece of land on the Wyoming-Colorado border and the people who occupy it.

This work of nonfiction is less aggressive than Bowden’s Blues. It is a book that begs you to take your time—the writing is so beautiful that you wish you could sit with each section (they’re not quite chapters) for days at a time. But those sections are short and my interest level was too high to not move quickly through this book. Sometimes there’s nothing better than nonfiction in a poet’s hands.

Bio: David Doody is Guernica’s blog editor and a founding editor of InDigest Magazine. Read his last recommendation here.

Tags: books, nonfiction, Poetry, staff recommendation

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