Vacationland

by Ander Monson

These are pleasure-inducing lamentations with an enticingly experimental edge. They elegize Michigan's Upper Peninsula, the copper mines, tourism, family, amateur radio, winter, and much more. These poems are affected by the claustrophobic, half-year Michigan winters, where the nearest city is a four-hour car ride. Monson's is a wildly original mind, creating exotic variations on traditional forms.

Genres: Poetry

95 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2005

About the author

Ander Monson is the author of Vanishing Point; Neck Deep and Other Predicaments, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize; the novel Other Electricities; and the poetry collections Vacationland and The Available World. He lives and teaches in Arizona and edits the magazine DIAGRAM.

Although Ander is a proud graduate of Knox College, he also received advanced degrees from Iowa State and the University of Alabama.

More info is available here.
http://poetry.arizona.edu/presenter-a...

Reviews

[Keith Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Monson has been doing so much these last few years, and has become an important figure. I'm kind of pleased I discovered him early on, when he still lived in Michigan and was a dynamic young teacher. I taught this book to undergraduates more than a decade ago, and managed to get a few words on it into print:

https://annarborobserver.com/articles...

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ander Monson, Vacationland (Tupelo Press, 2005)

Vacationland is a book that will bait and switch you, if you know nothing about it going in. The cover is one of those desperately happy, if somewhat pathetic, postcard images that seventies PR firms created to try and draw tourism to dying areas. You look at that—or I do, anyway—and think “fluff, surface, bubbly sucrose-laden doggerel.” Well, it turns out that Ander Monson consciously chose that cover (I'm assuming a level of control here without which the cover wouldn't make sense) out of a kind of sense of existential irony that would have made Sartre wet his pants in fear. For Vacationland is a litany of despair, death, and quotidian brutality unlike anything I've ever encountered in a book of poetry. Sylvia Plath had nothing on Ander Monson's depression modern.

“Chain of being, chain around my ankle
that keeps me always tethered to the earth,
that keeps my awful long-gone emphysema uncle
underneath the crusty surface...”
(--”Self-Portrait with Transgression”)

That's one of the lighter bits, where you can see a sliver of hope shining under the dead, decaying leaves. Never fear, it's tied to a string, and the purblind, yet chthonic, god that watches over the universe where Monson's poems are set (how close it is to the actual Upper Peninsula of Michigan I've no idea) is going to tug it backwards when you get close enough.

In other words, this is not work for the easily-depressed, or for the weak of heart. But is is very well-constructed, and if your worldview naturally comes with a dark tinge, you may well find a great deal to empathize, or identify, with in Monson's litanies. *** ½

[Biscuits · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just finished this book, like 2 minutes ago. Maybe, I should wait to write this review.

I have two conflicting thoughts on this book as a whole. One feels like Monson's use of subject matter and language in a repetitious and "different" way adds to the strong emotion of the text. Another feels like these same characteristics leave the text seeming empty of emotion, all rhetoric with no end feeling.

Probably, I felt the first way about 2/3 of the poems and the other about 1/3. I still give it a four because 1) the 2/3 are so good and 2) I'm a lightweight critic.

As a writer, I feel like I can learn something about "switching it up" both in form and style from Monson. I also see this collection as a good example of tackling a few issue (a friend's death, teenage things, etc).

My biggest complaint with Monson would be his misses (see: Inventory Elegies and Proposed Self-Elegy with Torque) when the words were there, but I didn't feel anything.

Favorites:
I especially like the 2nd section.
Celebrity
Approximation
Contingency Elegy
Lawrence Welk Dies
Moving Through Ether
Who Are The Dead
What If There Is No Ice
Post-Mortem Party Trick
Index: A

[MartyAnne · Rating 4 out of 5]

TITLE: VACATIONLAND
AUTHOR: SARAH STONICH
PUBLICATION DATE: APRIL 1, 2013
AUDIENCE: ADULT FICTION

REVIEW: This book has a collection of chapters that are each compelling, but more so when you realize these vignettes are a sequence of revelations. Characters lives touch as they live in or around "Vacationland" so the narrative often overlaps, pieces of the stories where people come together based on being here, at this place, at some time. In fact, time is the one thing both viscerally here and also absent. The characters weave in and out of time, memories, and experiences. There is no linear progression, but as you read, the weaving takes dimension and shape. After the first two chapters, I really loved reading this book. There is one chapter--I won't tell you where-- in which a man in pain narrates his absurd situation so well I laughed so hard I couldn't breathe.

END: SATISFYING
TAGS: Time, Talents, family, Orphan, family of choice, connections.
GOODREADS: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
PERMALINK: http://martysreads.blogspot.com/2013/...

[Mely]

Companion to Other Electricities. It doesn't stun me the way the novel does, but it has similar moments of loveliness (loneliness) and grief.

[Kyle Doty · Rating 1 out of 5]

Way too pretentious. The poems were obviously meant for only himself and a few select people he knew. Some of them were good, but the majority of them were just way too complex like he was trying to prove something to someone out in academia.

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really dig Monson's style. So glad he's coming to teach at my school.

[Colleen Coyne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really a 4.5 -- a few misses, but many of these poems are gorgeously wrought, emotionally raw, and sonically masterful.

[Sarah]

Vacationland by Ander Monson (2005)

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful sonnets in here, "The Blood Says Stun" especially. Good title, huh? Maybe the book is too long: some of the elegies seem like repeats.

[Silvia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sort of a poem version of Other Electricities, but not as excellent.

[Judy Cohoon]

I didn't read this book. I cannot get the author to come up. It should be Vacationland by Sarah


Stonich