The Biographer by David M. Katz

$21.00

We live in an age of memoir. Unlike previous eras, in which readers were encouraged to consider a poem or novel separately from the poet’s or novelist’s biography, the author’s life story seems today to have become the main thing—the primary element upon which a work of literature should be judged. In The Biographer, his fifth collection of poems, David M. Katz interrogates and explores that assumption.

The book’s title poem, Katz’s longest published work to date, tackles the issue head on. Heavily researched and packed with crucial themes that are indeed close to this particular poet (immigration, child abandonment, the elusiveness of memory, Judaism), “The Biographer,” is nevertheless entirely fictional, spoken by a female narrator who is clearly not the poet.

At the same time, practically all of the book’s other poems might also be called “biography-adjacent”—autobiographical, memoirish, impersonated, personal. Recollections of early childhood and family romance play a central part, as do Katz’s usual cast of presiding poetic deities, this time including the likes of Hart Crane, Cavafy, Delmore Schwartz, Poe, Dickinson, Joyce, Pound, Rilke, and Marianne Moore. David Katz is a poet whose work resides in a paradise of other poets.