Bad Hobby - by Kathy Fagan (Paperback)

About the Book

"Bad Hobby is a hard-earned meditation on questions about lineage, caregiving, loss, and poetry"--

Book Synopsis

From Kingsley Tufts Award finalist Kathy Fagan comes Bad Hobby, a perceptive collection focused on memory, class, and might-have-beens.

In a working-class family that considers sensitivity a "fatal diagnosis," how does a child grow up to be a poet? What happens when a body "meant to bend & breed" opts not to, then finds itself performing the labor of care regardless? Why do we think our "common griefs" so singular? Bad Hobby is a hard-earned meditation on questions like these-a dreamscape speckled with swans, ghosts, and weather updates.

Fagan writes with a kind of practical empathy, lamenting pain and brutality while knowing, also, their inevitability. A dementing father, a squirrel limp in the talons of a hawk, a "child who won't ever get born" with age, Fagan posits, the impact of ordeals like these changes. Loss becomes instructive. Solitude becomes a shared experience. "You think your one life precious--"

And Bad Hobby thinks--hard. About lineage, about caregiving. About time. It paces "inside its head, gazing skyward for a noun or phrase to / shatter the glass of our locked cars & save us." And it does want to save us, or at least lift us, even in the face of immense bleakness, or loneliness, or the body changing, failing. "Don't worry, baby," Fagan tells us, the sparrow at her window. "We're okay."

Review Quotes

"Fagan leans into descriptions of the world that pay tribute to what it is, not what it could or might be. 'How will I choose, ' she writes, 'between Heaven & Sorry.' This vibrant book resides in that in-between, honoring the loss that comes with love."-Publishers Weekly

"I drank Kathy Fagan's Bad Hobby down in one gulp, as I suspect you will, Reader. I can't imagine that anyone could set this book down with poems still unread. Fagan's subject is loss--the death of one parent, the receding of the other into dementia's distances: 'I said like, as in: like we kill time. / I mean metaphor, as when time kills us back.' 'The art of losing, ' as Bishop wrote, is mastered here with intelligence, wit, tenderness, and a blending of the personal, historical, and etymological. Reader, prepare yourself for wonderment. Take time. Drink up."--Maggie Smith

"Bad Hobby is an exquisite and excruciating book of continual epiphany and insight. The poems are gorgeous, or they're stony, or they're both; they astutely examine caregiving, memory-making, the inscrutability of childhood, the inscrutability of old age, and how on earth to exist in between. In this tenuous time, I'm so grateful for Fagan's brilliant excavations of hospitals and pastures and classrooms and dreamscapes and how a body learns to live and to die."--Natalie Shapero

"The poems of Bad Hobby seem familiar because they are familiar. We recognize ourselves in these lines and stories. We see ourselves as children, adults, and the elderly."--Tweet Speak Blog

Praise for Sycamore

"It's hard not to fall in love with this book, with its bravado and vulnerability. Kathy Fagan's mind is endless with depth and truth--her thoughts like songs, her heart and wit twin birds flying in the air of the pages, landing on the tree limbs of her lines. How fierce and immense to imagine living in her grove of sycamores, hardy, odd, and gorgeous. There, we are bigger than ourselves--we are each other too, living and remembering within each other's shadows, limbs, sky. Sycamore is a book a reader clutches to her chest, eyes closed for a moment in bliss and recognition."--Brenda Shaughnessy

"Sycamore is a complex and layered poetic consideration of the mortality of relationships, of the body, of eros, and, most generally, of the moments in time we momentarily inhabit. These are timeless poetic themes, but what Kathy Fagan does with them is stunningly original. From the cryptic and fascinating 'Platanaceae Family Tree' that opens the book, Sycamore is erudite and referential and nonetheless consistently welcoming as we navigate Fagan's inventive structures and nuanced wordplay. This collection gives us a full view of the human heart and mind simultaneously in action."--Wayne Miller

"Kathy Fagan's poems are pitiless, sensual, mythic, and steeped in elucidative mystery. I admire her sleek armor of language and landscape: she may 'dress defensively'; however, 'all that pristine weather / and footwear later to discover: dead is still dead.' Fagan's sleights of hand reveal yet withhold, out of mercy, hard-won beauty and pain: 'Sycamore. Sick amour. Seek no more.' Sycamore is one of the most inventive, vulnerable, and moving collections I have read in years."--Randall Mann