The Nervous Breakdown Reviews Andrew Choate's Learning

The Nervous Breakdown reviews Andrew Choate's Learning (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2018), "an engaging onset of 'lessons'" generated by a refrain, as Rebecca Ramirez notes, "which meld exacting analyses and emotional reaction." More:

...Each refrain at once builds, redirects, and softens the readers pace as one travels through Choate’s own inner nature. Examples range from darker, Michaux-esque musings “Things I learned from The Tin Drum – Light attracts all/ but only some will linger in semidarkness” to tongue-in-cheek literary commentary, “Things I learned from Oblomov – Lovers are terribly long winded” (108). From its distaste for intellectual brouhaha to its “tiddly-winkishness” (29), the result is writing that is intellect-stirring at its least and heart-jostling at its best. Though it sometimes arrives in a form which blurs the borders between anecdote, aphorism, syllogism, and poetry, the divisive forward slash (which appears constantly) suggests that these variations on form, in chorus, function as a body of Choate’s own poetics.

Yet the writer, at the books epigraph, also invokes his wariness of language: “we should not hunt out archaic or far-fetched words and eccentric metaphors and figures of speech…we should seek precepts which will help us, utterances of courage and spirit which may at once be turned into facts. We should so learn them that words become deeds.” (Seneca, ca. AD 65) For how transcendent, really, are the allusive, sometimes ostentatious, and oft- profound—musings of a poet? 

Read the full review right here.