Peck & Peck

For everyone waiting for Bonnie Garmus’s follow-up to her brilliant Lessons in Chemistry in 2022, it’s finally here. Peck & Peck is a New York poetry journal run by twin brothers, who also hate each other. The journal’s 39 editors all specialize in some subset of poetry and editorial meetings are cutthroat affairs as each editor thinks their specialty is without question the best. Since it’s 1982 and the Internet doesn’t yet exist, Peck & Peck’s copy room in the basement churns out hundreds of copies of poems and editorial dictates every day. New college graduate Batter Gray lands what he thinks is his dream job, having loved poetry from a young age, but he’s quickly confronted with the most dysfunctional co-workers ever, a mailroom run by parolees, and an incinerator that ravenously welcomes nearly every poem submitted. Add in a security guard whose main job is to keep all those pesky poets lurking in the lobby away from the editors at all costs, and you have a snort-out-loud funny novel.