Overview

In Tell Me Please, What's the Matter, David Booth combines memoir, poetry, fiction, and essay to explore masculinity, artistic creation, family bonds, and the role of cultural narratives in shaping identity amid social discord and global uncertainty. While this hybrid approach can reflect a chaotic mind, Booth creates moments of profound reflection, highlighting both the instability of contemporary life and the grounding achieved by paying attention. The thirty-five pieces collected here play out tensions between doubt and meaning-making, offering readers a eeply personal yet universally resonant meditation on selfhood and creativity.

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9781958728376

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Reviews

e singular magic of David Booth's Tell Me Please, What's the Matter, resides in its dazzling breadth of style and form, the way it both wanders and coheres with a smart, probing curiosity that embraces humor and reverence. Steeped in dailiness and deep contemplation, these pieces distill a witty, sustained world wariness as they traverse a range of internal and external geographies, bringing us moments from a writing and thinking life that explore concerns of marriage and family, literature and visual art, history and our contemporary world. Unpredictable and idiosyncratic, Booth's vision is nevertheless deeply, universally truthful. His acts of contemplation inspire and provoke, and his voice is at once con dent and searching for something just beyond its grasp, working in the tradition of great literature that unfolds toward discovery. ese pieces of prose and poetry, which touch the edges of genre and expand what we expect from language, are absolute gifts, worthy of time to savor and contemplate. Amanda Moore Author of Requeening Existential in its scope, yet intimate in its scale, David Booth's Tell Me Please, What's the Matter enthralls with sharp observations, poignant associations, and exquisitely wrought sentences. rough eclectic vignettes, elegant concrete poems, and sweeping lyric essays, Booth weaves the fraying lines of philosophical and aesthetic traditions into contemporary kitchens and bedrooms, galleries and gardens, landscapes and minds on edge in a distinctly American way. Artists and philosophers populate these pages, but the speakers and characters who ponder them are not experts or academics. ey are refreshingly, achingly, just trying to make sense of the world and each other. At its core, this is a book about communication and relationships. A wise and tender humanity permeates each connection and each failure to connect. Booth's ability to balance invention and heart is a rare gift, and this is an extraordinary book. Erin Rodoni Author of And If the Woods Carry You

Author Information

A poet and educator in the humanities, David Booth teaches teens in the San Francisco Bay area. Tell Me Please, What's the Matter is his second poetry collection, following his debut, Too Bright to See, published by Simi Press in 2021. He serves on the board of the Marin Poetry Center and shares insights on imaginative writing at sacredpedestrians.com.

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