67. THE HAYFLICK LIMIT BY MATTHEW TIERNEY

Like somebody else posted here a while ago, summer is a difficult time for reading with any consistency. One picks something up, reads it a bit, puts it down, picks up something else, and etc. 

However I’m working away at about 3 or 4 books right now, and I did finish this little book a while ago.

Tierney’s poetry is good, just not for me, I think. I wrote the following in my notebook:

I can tell that I’ve lived in Vancouver for a relatively long time because I’m no longer interested in a poetics that has no politics, or to be more precise, a poetics with no political sense of the wider world outside the poem, no acknowledgement of its own privilege as such. The narrative voice in The Hayflick Limit strikes me at times as a typical privileged young cisgendered straight white middle to upper middle class mentally stable impressed with his own cleverness male voice, and this is a subject position for which I have little to no use. 

This now strikes me as an unnecessarily harsh criticism. It’s possible I was just grumpy from reading on a hot day. I think Tierney’s writing is actually quite good; it’s just not to my tastes.

-Nikki R.