Tell Us How to Live is a book of poetry but also a book of answers. Ace Boggess has crafted poems based on questions since 2002. He finds these questions in conversations, literary works, advertisements, social-media posts, and anywhere they appear, using them as titles and responding in thought-provoking, serious, lighthearted, or often unpredictable ways. This book offers a selection of these poems exploring the author’s insights on the strangeness of the world around him and the smaller world within.
Ace Boggess’s brilliantly original book consists entirely of poems with interrogative titles and unexpected responses in verse. It is not merely a collection but a unified book. The first question is, “Do You Have Any Advice for Inmates?” Boggess has the right to answer because he has done time. In one poem, he describes himself as an “unemployed ex-con hiding in a red state” (he also has a law degree). These are real poems, not the products of some enlightened prison workshop. With wit and a wonderful speed of association, Boggess addresses such subjects as luck, loss, music, adultery, drugs, and guns, with references, sometimes surprising, to Hamlet, the Serenity prayer, the Divine, Van Morrison, “the Schopenhauer of punk,” and Don Giovanni, among other cultural landmarks. The book has charm and humor, and it is also deeply moving: “You’d like to be / the hero once, but it’s you who walked through gates / afraid, as though you’ve been on trial all your life.”
David Lehman, series editor of Best American Poetry, author of The Evening Sun and The Morning Line
Ace Boggess’s Tell Us How to Live is a thrilling inquiry into lived experiences and the nature of observation, rendered through an innovative and intriguing premise. In this book, haunting poems portray the haunted, inspirations spin out into further implications, and etymology and exploration reign. “You have to feed the memory,” Boggess writes, and in doing so, he feeds the reader’s spirit, too. The structure of the book is particularly inviting, as each title poses a question and premise so that, as a reader, one feels in intimate conversation with the vast pantheon of figures and documents that provide them, as well as with Boggess himself. These queries are charged with urgency, humor, and pathos, and in response, Boggess nimbly shifts between forms, voices, and concepts to craft poems that are sensitive, clever, and poignant in turn. What results is a tribute to the human spirit and a triumph of a collection.
Kenzie Allen, author of Cloud Missives
Ace Boggess’s Tell Us How to Live is pure delight. I love how every poem’s title is a quotation, whether it be from Shakespeare, a Facebook post, Socrates, a rehab workbook, Goodreads, Whitman, or Dostoevsky. I relish this book for its luminous foray into the speaker’s psyche and for revelatory lines like “Find happiness as often as you can & / hold it to your lips like chocolate” and “There’s too much human / in being human, & not enough / being.” Providing just the right blend of humor and wisdom, Boggess has created the perfect book for getting us through the toughest of times.
Martha Silano, author of Gravity Assist and This One We Call Ours
Ace Boggess
is the author of seven previous books of poetry, two novels, and a short-story collection. He serves as senior editor at The Adirondack Review and associate editor at The Evening Street Review. His awards include the Robert Bausch Fiction Award and a fellowship from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts. Boggess was locked up for five years in the West Virginia prison system, an experience which has been the basis for much of his writing. He currently resides in Charleston, West Virginia.