Bad Hobby

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 thesea 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 wont 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 thinkshard. 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. Dont worry, baby, Fagan tells us, the sparrow at her window. Were okay.