Solitude and Society

How refreshing to read these poems of wit and grace, of genuine feeling with an arch wink, set against a web of intimacies and anxieties and bright flashes of experience, the small pleasures that fill our days. The poems in Scout Turkel’s Solitude and Society—confident & expansive—craft a new way forward for us all. What a gift they are and she is.

Intertextual, frank, seeing. These poems speak from places of deep affection, friction, and doubt to ask how poetry might remain as vital, excessive, and mutinous as life is. Dialoging with art, history, and other beings, the poems move through uncomfortable moods in an embodied grammar of skepticism and wonder. Solitude and Society is a testament to our entanglements and efforts to think—and live—at a slant.

Names and nature abound in Scout Turkel’s Solitude and Society, where nature is not a strange Other but the same substance as the human speaker—bound to her as closely as the names that recur throughout the poems. This dialectic between human and nature, and the question it raises—what form of nature is human nature?—illuminates the quotation from which the collection takes its title: “Solitude is impracticable, and society fatal.” Rather than answering that question, the poems enact the dialectic itself, asking the reader simply to be attentive. As Turkel writes in “Modern Poem,” “It is not impossible / To be copiously awake.”