Praise for The Importance of Being Feeble-Minded (forthcoming September 2024 in the Propel Disability Poetry Series):
Nathan Spoon’s collection, The Importance of Being Feeble-Minded, is not the treatise you may presume from its title alone. This is a book that never fails to follow a thought to its end, and no matter the road taken to get there, with all its spellbinding turns, we always arrive at a revelation. Spoon’s words reinforce that poetry, that place where heart and mind touch and spark, is what lights up a life worth living, no matter the burdens placed upon the person living it. These pages praise the questioning; they relish the ritual of looking at the thing, through it, around it; they do not apologize for awe at the smallness of large things and the largeness of small things. The key word here is importance, folks. What leaves the lasting impression on us is what truly matters: you cannot be the same person after reading this book that you were before it, and that is why it is so important to pick it up.”
—Cortney Lamar Charleston, author of Doppelgangbanger
“Like hits of pure oxygen, the poems in Nathan Spoon’s collection The Importance of Being Feeble-Minded will breathe you heady with their syntactical unfolding, inquisitive sincerity, and pivots of imagination and observation. They are the revere in reverie, clear and otherworldly, fascinating and fascinated—each “beautiful and exemplary beast” of a poem is an “alternate [future] worth living” crafted of “real language that makes anyone / giver or receiver out of the made stuff of itself.” A truly superb collection you’ll return to—as I have—often.”
—Flower Conroy, author of Greenest Grass
“From the first poem in Nathan Spoon’s new collection, I felt interwoven with all living things. I felt an expansive sense of belonging to the natural and metaphysical world. Spoon’s language distills the complex into something nested and true. Each poem is a micro- and macrocosm: the brown glass bottle containing a universe, the cabin mirror holding a whole human relationship, a dream cupping another dimension within it. Spoon’s poems build a world that mirrors a heart, “Call it the heart / of your heart if you will.” These poems “will fit inside and carry you.” Because “when a black hole / swallows a star, / it must do so / tenderly, since / a universe hinges / on tenderness.” May we learn from these poems a grammar of tenderness and be bold and soft enough to declare as Spoon does: “I want to be a beautiful and exemplary beast.””
—Mónica Gomery, author of Might Kindred
“A remarkable book. I’m disarmed by the gentleness and steadiness of Spoon’s voices. Each poem invites me to stay, long after its end. I’m astonished at how possible they make a tender world seem. Pick up this book and visit with me.”
—K. Iver, author of Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco
“Someone drawn to the explicit provocation of this book’s title may feel at first confounded, as these poems are not treatises, but experiences, enactments of ways of knowing and ways of being—ways of knowing and ways of being that, yes, have been historically marginalized and dismissed. I would . . . posit that the title’s celebration of neurodivergence is implicitly insisted upon throughout. “I just kept focus and kept writing this passage while waiting for its skin to come off,” writes Spoon in “Early Saturday Evening”: poem as intact artifact of observations and thoughts growing into being—and poem as embodiment of that sensation. This poem calls back to an earlier poem, “All Our Spoons at Once”: “there should be more snakes . . . and more tongues should be the tongues of snakes.” Yes, more snakes, please. And more attention to these poems of Nathan Spoon’s that are snakes and snake skins and space and enclosures all at once. And more poems by Nathan Spoon.”
—Dora Malech, author of Flourish
In Nathan Spoon’s The Importance of Being Feeble-Minded he writes, “It is like / the ontology of being unaware of how many selves / can be contained within a single individual.” This collection is a discovery of those selves painstakingly recovered through imagistic richness and lyrical dexterity. These poems at once disrupt and comfort, creating a full spectrum of emotion and thought. Poem after poem, Spoon delivers a tender truth of what it means to figure out the world around through a neurodivergent lens and the sublimity found in the everyday moment.
—Airea D. Matthews, author of Bread and Circus
“Having been a big fan of Nathan Spoon’s breathtaking, utterly original poems for decades now, I feel filled with joy, ready to celebrate and savor this new collection.”
—Naomi Shihab Nye, author of The Tiny Journalist
A few poems from the collection:
Nathan Spoon 