To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight

Poetry is such a compressed art that for me it often requires some space, some context, in which to breathe. Terrance Hayes has taken an entire book to put the work—really a single poem, the appropriately titled "The Idea of Ancestry"—of one of his predecessors, the Black Arts-era poet Etheridge Knight, into context. The result feels like a whole ecosystem, full of air shared and recycled and revived from poet to poet, tracing not only Hayes's debt to Knight but his embeddedness in a written and lived world of friends, fellow artists, mentors. Some of my favorite books—Nicholson Baker's U and I, Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage—are structured like this one: one writer reckoning with a lifelong obsession with another writer, in all its flaws and failures and excesses. I loved this book too.