The Secret Life of This Life Now #31

Last in a series of 31 brief essays about the coming and going of a book.

Detail of painting by Stefano Cipollari used as cover art for This Life Now

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Today’s is the final installment of Secret Life. Herein, I finish telling the behind-the-scenes story of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems. Having followed this story of love and loss, one or two of you may even want to read the book. So note the following—

You can get both This Life Now and my second book of poems, Drug and Disease Free, for the bargain-basement, fire-sale price of $10.00 total, including shipping within the US. Order yours now!

In the 31 installments of this series, we have gone through This Life Now poem by poem, read a snippet (sometimes more), and chatted a bit about the context and creation of the poem and the book.

Today we look at the last poem in the book, “You see, the thing is.” You will never read a more sweet and tender love poem. Here it is in full:

You see, the thing is,

I’ve been in love before,
but never like this,
the way I lie, arm around him,
dark outside, can’t sleep,
thinking of mother in a hospital bed,
lying awake while dawn comes,
yellow, gray, and slightly stale,
the hundred and eighty
degrees I turn, the away I face,
clock I check as he rolls over,
fast asleep, and catches me.

I shared in an earlier Secret Life how my mother had a stroke in 2004, three days before her eighty-third birthday. She recovered well from that, but in the spring she was diagnosed with biliary cancer. The plan was radiation and chemotherapy, but then she had a heart attack while in the hospital. The doctors said she was too frail to continue treatment, and that, given the aggressive cancer, her overall health status, and her age, the best course of action was hospice, which meant keeping her comfortable until she died, which she did on June 23, 2005.

The poem above was written while my mother was still in the hospital, before she was moved into hospice care. The poem requires no explanation.

And that’s how the book ends—a declaration of love for my ex-husband, the precocious poet, and also of gratitude for his having come into my life, his being there to catch me on this night in the spring of 2005 while my mother lay dying in the hospital.

Somewhere, at some point, I intend to write more about our relationship, our marriage, and our divorce. But not here. It is the book, This Life Now, that is the intended subject of this finally concluding series of essays.

So it’s a 2014 book based on a manuscript that was drafted in 2006. I submitted it to virtually every contest in poetry world two years in a row. Not even an honorable mention. Then I shelved it, because I was finishing my doctorate in classics. In particular, I was working on a kick-ass dissertation on a cutting-edge topic.

I was also very involved in student government and program governance. I was instrumental in getting my program to include students on standing committees, which was CUNY Grad Center policy, but was not honored in my program. With other students, I organized our program’s first-ever graduate students conference, which became an annual event, and I started a chartered organization—a type of interdisciplinary affinity group—that gave us access to student government funding for our annual conferences. Working on that doctorate from 2005 until my defense in 2010—including the scholarly part of it as well as the service part of it—made for five of the best years of my life.

I recounted in a recent Secret Life how things went for me in the years after I earned my PhD. Pretty well, at first, with the one-year postdoc at the University of South Carolina. But downhill after that, as I came off the academic market and settled into a life of—gag me with a caduceus—freelance medical writing. A freelance career which, mind you, I was eager to embark on in 2003, when it meant freedom from corporate cubicles, and time to work on my poetry, my MFA, and my PhD. But by 2013 I wanted to be past that stopgap, and the universe did not seem to be cooperating.

Then, in the spring of 2013, my ex and I went to the Rainbow Book Fair—a putatively annual LGBTQ+ event—at the Holiday Inn Midtown on West 57th Street. He introduced me to Julie Enszer, who was staffing the table for Sinister Wisdom, the trailblazing lesbian feminist journal started in 1976 that Julie has edited since 2010. Julie had a close personal and collaborative relationship with Lawrence Schimel, the founder of A Midsummer Nights Press. Apparently my name had come up in a discussion Julie had with Lawrence about gay poets he might like to publish in the coming year. Julie suggested I send him a manuscript. And I did.

Before I go further into this story, I want to make it very clear that Lawrence was, is, and always will be a great publisher and a great friend. (In fact, Lawrence later became an Indolent Books author as translator from the Spanish of the poetry collection Impure Acts by Ángelo Néstore.) The bottom line of the tale I am about to tell is that I sold myself short in various ways that ended up leaving me very sad and very disheartened about my poetry career. It’s nobody’s fault. Not even mine. I made decisions. I regretted some of them. I suffered. And now I feel better. That is an occasion for gratitude. I am grateful for that. So here’s the story….

The books in Lawrence’s Body Language series were poetry collections about queer existence and queer experience. Frankly, I did not realize that as I sent him my manuscript, which was about sixty percent gay existence and gay experience stuff. The rest of it was far ranging—for example, a straight couple’s poignant struggle to conceive a child safely when the man had HIV; some 9/11 sonnets; an officer delivering news of a death to the next of kin during the Iraq war; a poem about so-called “killer algae”; God’s sense of betrayal in the Garden of Eden; and so on.

It was perfectly reasonable for Lawrence to send me back a cut of the manuscript that aligned with his vision for the Body Language series. Perfectly reasonable—but I had not expected it. I was alarmed. More than that, I knew I had probably another thirty or so poems—gay existence and gay experience poems, if you will—that would have fit quite nicely into this newly conceived configuration of This Life Now. And I said as much to Lawrence in my reply email.

And here’s the crucial thing—In his response, Lawerence wrote, “I’d be happy to look at any additional poems you wish to send me,” or words to that effect. I can no longer find that email—I think it’s from too many computers ago. So all good, right? Right. Except I choked. I didn’t want to jinx it. I did not want to scare Lawrence off. I did not want him to think I was a problem child. I did not want to do anything that might jeopardize the publication of the book. Again, again, again, I want to reiterate—Nothing he ever said, did, or put in writing ever gave me any reason to have any of these concerns. Never ever ever. I did not need him to sabotage me—I was perfectly capable of sabotaging myself. And I did.

From then, design and production rolled along through the winter of 2014, and the book was published in March. I was thrilled. I organized a blowout book party for myself at the now defunct reBar in the super hip Dumbo (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) neighborhood in Brooklyn. It was fabulously well attended. I sold lots of books.

But something happened. It is not totally clear to me what happened, but it happened. For one thing, as time went by after the book’s pub date, I started to feel worse and worse about the poems I did NOT include in the book. But that is far from all that was going on with me emotionally. In fact, after not keeping a regular daily journal for many years, I started one on January 1, 2014. I started keeping a journal on that date because I felt that something was going on with me, and I wanted a record of whatever that something was. In that first entry, I wrote, “My major themes right now are getting old and feeling like a failure.”

Then, on November 14, 2014, I wrote this:

I had such a nice day yesterday. Just a regular day—fed the outside cats, made breakfast for J—, went for my run, and worked all day (with a break for a nap in the afternoon). But that’s the whole point. Enjoying a regular day. I used to enjoy my regular days. Then I stopped. Stopped enjoying my regular days. It happened some time in the spring. Shortly after the book came out, apparently. It feels like it all started the day I read Timothy Liu’s review of my book on Coldfront.

Ah, Timothy Liu’s review of my book on Coldfront. Again, not unlike what I said about my publisher and friend Lawrence Schimel, Tim Liu is a dear poetry friend. Similarly the two poets who founded and edited Coldfront—Melinda Wilson and John Deming—are not only dear friends, but are now both Indolent Books authors (Headline News in 2018 by John, and What It Was Like to Be a Woman in 2024 by Melinda). So this is not about people with whom I have any beef or towards whom I harbor any grudges. It’s just shit that happened, that none of these folks—Tim, John, Melinda—even knew was happening.

That being said—Here’s Tim’s review in full. The exact date of the review is hard to pin down at this point, but it appears to have been within a few weeks of the book’s publication. The reason I am posting it in full is to make clear the fact that it’s not a bad review. It’s actually a pretty good review. See if you can figure out the part that got me down. I’ll disclose the answer after you read the review. (The number 15 indicates that my book was fifteenth in Tim’s series of 100 reviews in 100 days.)

15. This Life Now
Michael Broder,
A Midsummer’s Night Press, 2014

What I keep returning to in this too-short book (my one big quibble: the thirty-plus manuscript pages make more for a fat chapbook than a slim volume of poems retailing for $13.95!) are the Tony Poems, Tony as the Beloved Messenger of Viral Peril who haunts whatever comes after. A few decades in the making, Broder’s debut is beyond resentment. Having cleaned up his side of the street, we are left tenderly haunted by his “normal” suburban homo childhood as prelude to the AIDS pandemic followed by Broder’s long lyrical postlude that bears witness to survival without glorifying it, looking back wistfully instead on a time when reckless passion was at its height.

Disclosures: Back in the day, MB curated a fine reading series at the Ear Inn on the East Bank of the Hudson.

Favorites: Prologue; Tony Poem; Another Tony Poem (“But tonight, if I went down”); The Remembered One.

Can you guess what really galled me? It was Tim’s assessment that my “too-short book” was suited “more for a fat chapbook than a slim volume of poems,” and he had to throw in the “retailing for $13.95” just to twist the knife a little bit more. As you can imagine, seeing Tim’s comments about the whole fat chapbook thing only reinforced the regret and self-recrimination that I already felt about letting my beloved 60-page manuscript get whittled down to 35 pages.

So, yes, 2014 was a bad mental health year for me. In fact, I dubbed it The Great Depression of 2014. I think there were other factors that contributed, but a big part of The Great Depression of 2014 had to do with the negative emotions that were dragged up by everything surrounding the publication of This Life Now. There was a sort of false start, false alarm kind of feel to the whole thing.

But most of it seems to have been generated between my own two ears. For example, I think of my participation in the NYU creative writing program alumni reading in September 2014, six months after the book came out. I read with fellow poets Nicole Callihan and R. A. Villanueva. As with Tim Liu, both are dear poetry friends. I wanted nothing but the best for them. And yet, I could not help but notice that each of them sold a number of books after the reading, while I sold none. My fellow NYU alumni in the audience did not seem to be particularly jazzed about my too-short fat chapbook that was posing as a debut full-length collection.

Upon leaving the event, I told my ex how awful I felt about the whole thing. My qualms about the book itself. The fat-chapbook-ness of it all. He responded, “There’s no such thing as a bad book.” I get it. I get what he meant. Take the win and start working on the next book. Which was probably not bad advice. But it was not what I needed from him in that moment. What I needed was for him to see me, to see my pain and sadness, even if he thought they were unwarranted, and simply to comfort me. Not advise me. Just comfort me. Just love me.

And I think I’m going to more or less leave it there. Except to say the book was ultimately a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry in 2015. I lost to Danez Smith, which was as it should have been—I mean that with all my heart and soul, and I meant it at the time, having read his work in journals and having witnessed Danez doing his thing at an offsite reading at AWP in Minneapolis in April of 2015. That was his year, and he deserved it.

So here we reach the end of The Secret Life of This Life Now. All 31 installments of it. One for every poem in the book. Things are much different for me now. I have done a lot of wonderful things in the past ten years. Whatever was going on with The Great Depression of 2014, it abated. Things got really good again for a while. Then they got really bad again. Then I got divorced. And now it’s now. I could even say, “now it’s this life now.” But I’m not going to say that. That would be cheesy.

À la prochaine. Whenever that may be.

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