Maps to Anywhere

This is a book of short pieces of different types. Many of them are prose poems not totally unlike the Charles Baudelaire book I’m leisurely making my way through. I didn’t love a lot of these. I thought the stories where he talks about his family were much better, still having his interesting style, but with more feeling and seeming more solid, where some of the other pieces seemed sort of forced and self consciously "artsy".

This is a book of short pieces of different types. Many of them are prose poems not totally unlike the Charles Baudelaire book I’m leisurely making my way through. I didn’t love a lot of these. I thought the stories where he talks about his family were much better, still having his interesting style, but with more feeling and seeming more solid, where some of the other pieces seemed sort of forced and self consciously "artsy".

I read this for a class and found Cooper's poetic style to be really inspiring to me. This probably, mostly, because it seems a lot like my own, although more honed; the way he deals with subjects, de familiarizing them, is something I would like to incorporate into my own voice.

Bernard Cooper is a genius of the short story genre. I originally purchased this book in anticipation of a reading I was planning to attend, and quickly became enamored with his writing style.