Prayer Book of the Anxious by Josephine Yu (review)

The "project book" and its attendant concerns have become major characteristics of the contemporary poetry landscape. But in many ways, any book of poems is a "project," its compilation necessarily a contained, self-informing, and recursive endeavor. By putting poems together, one is project-making. Even collections that don't have an overt narrative arc or pervasive connective tissue end up cohering in surprising ways. The "project book" has, particularly in contemporary poetry, become a descriptor for groups of poems that are written for and in complete awareness of one another: concept albums. This is sometimes viewed as a derogatory designation—books that rely upon the tropes and tactics of narrative fiction in order to achieve completion. However, the prevalence of these collections indicates a greater evolution: more deliberate consideration of the reader and their experience of reading, likely the reason we see fewer and fewer "greatest hits" type collections, or gatherings of monolithic one-offs. Josephine Yu's Elixir Press Poetry Award Winning collection Prayer Book of The Anxious typifies this accommodative approach to book-making, and the kinds of successes only possible through a holistic approach to collection.

The recursive structure of Prayer Book has several concurrent threads: excerpts from "The Palm-Leaf Manuscript," an embedded text of mythos in trauma, despair, and faith; various prayers/apologies/proverbs/theories/psalms/pleas/calls to action, many of which begin as empirical meditations on intimacy and grief, and develop into far-reaching lyrics; and situational poems voiced from archetypal personalities (The Compulsive Liar, The Optimist, The Narcissist, The Manic Depressive). The book is working with a complement of thematic and rhetorical lenses, constellated to animate some of the myriad manifestations of anxiety and obsession from the particular vantage of a Roman Catholic upbringing, its reckonings and reformations. In "If I Raise My Daughter Catholic," a poem appropriately written as a series of questions, Yu muses "Will she make a confessional of every space / she enters—doctor's office, cab of a pickup, blank / page, hollow of a lover's collar bone—/ lips parted to issue an ecstasy of failings?", a line of inquiry derived from the collection's staging of those very ecstasies. The failings, however, are only minutely related to religious shortcomings. Far more responsible for the discrepancy in ways of being between the theoretical—and theological—and the actual, are anguish and longing. Pervasive in these poems, as in our lives, are the forces of socioeconomic poverty, sexual violence, heartbreak, and death. And while they are tended to with seriousness, they also give rise to Yu's sardonic wit, self-effacing humor, and ultimately, her refusal to look away from the absurd.

To note that Prayer Book is also preoccupied with guilt would be an observation too reductive of its reckoning with Catholicism; while much of the penitence performed in the collection is indeed religiously inflected, Yu's brand of remorse is about awareness. Plea of the Penitent begins by begging for forgiveness of "our sins, mostly the result of a deficit of attention," a figuration that sees iteration in several confounding expressions of forgiveness: a middle-school friend who makes weekly phone calls to her rapist uncle; a babysitter who reacts to her employer's sexual advance with gentleness; the conclusion of Plea of the Penitent imploring, "Take us to the pound / in Leon County, to the gravel runs in the back. / Show us the arthritic husky or tumored retriever, the one shivering / with anticipation for the long car ride home." There's an indiscriminate urge to take care of things, and to dignify those who have suffered by portraying them as transcending the finitude of victimhood. This is attention to hope and possibility, and to the heroism of persistence.

The cadre of Catholic saints featured in Prayer Book, invoked through pleas and prayers, are called upon without irony, though Yu makes no cover of their tongue-in-cheek repurposing for the collection's singular and often secular lyric meditations ("Saint Lawrence, patron against fire, tortured on the gridiron, / martyr who wisecracked...