If Men, Then, Eliza Griswold
If Men, Then, Eliza Griswold
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If Men, Then
Poems

Author: Eliza Griswold

Narrator: Eliza Griswold

Unabridged: 47 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/11/2020

Synopsis

A darkly humorous new collection of poems by the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author of Wideawake Field and Amity and Prosperity

If Men, Then, Eliza Griswold’s second poetry collection, charts a radical spiritual journey through catastrophe. Griswold’s language is forthright and intimate as she steers between the chaos of a tumultuous inner world and an external landscape littered with SUVs, CBD oil, and go bags, talismans of our time. Alternately searing and hopeful, funny and fraught, the poems explore the world’s fracturing through the collapse of the ego, embodied in a character named “I”—a soul attempting to wrestle with itself in the face of an unfolding tragedy.

"Griswold narrates with a strong voice and moderate pacing. “What can we offer the child at the border,” she begins with her poem “Prayer.” Then she continues with her other pieces about race, immigration, and spirituality." — BookRiot

About Eliza Griswold

Eliza Griswold is the author of six books of poetry and nonfiction, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Her book Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America was awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction. She writes for The New Yorker, is the Ferris Professor and Director of the Program in Journalism at Princeton University, and lives in New Jersey with her husband and son.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Jon on December 23, 2024

So much of who we perceive ourselves to be is based on the connections we make with others. Eliza Griswold shows us how we often forget (contextually) the web of connectivity we are caught in with everyone else; and how very fragile that web is. The problem is that we fail to see this connectivity u......more

Goodreads review by disco on August 12, 2023

The Gaia hypothesis holds that the earth is a body possessing the means to rid itself of aggressors and malignancies.......more

Goodreads review by Emma on April 16, 2022

I clicked with the first few poems in If Men, Then but spent the rest of the collection hoping to get that feeling back. Griswold's poems are full of Classics references -- most of which I could identify as references but lacked the context to make meaning of. A knowledge of these texts most likely......more

Quotes

"Griswold has taken the Whitmanesque 'I'—'I' as everyone—and made it unmistakably singular . . . Though the sequence nods to the surreal and the psychological—Rimbaud’s 'Je est un autre'—there are also echoes of John Berryman and Sylvia Plath, poets closer to home whose self-awareness was enacted on the page in the form of characters, masks, new selves . . . wry and intimate, sophisticated and all [Griswold's] own—imagining the adventure that is being." —Kevin Young, The New Yorker

"This second poetry collection from Griswold is profoundly of its moment (just look at the CBD oil references), but its language feels somehow eternal." —Emma Specter, Vogue

"[Griswold] writes poems so emotionally charged they seem on the verge of spilling over . . . palpable and provocative poems that can be appreciated by broad audience." —Karla Huston, Library Journal

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