Review of Ander Monson, “Letter to a Future Lover,” from The Best of Brevity, edited by Zoë Bossiere and Dinty W. Moore, 20-21.  Brookline, MA: Rose Metal Press, 2020.

Briefly, this essay is a lyrical rumination on an enigmatic inscription within a used copy of Gary Snyder’s Turtle Island, an inscription to a lover.  The narrator wonders if this letter was ever sent and to whom it may have been intended.  The narrator muses on how this found its way into a used book, which the narrator picked up at a used bookstore, Casa de los Niños.

I had to read it twice, this “letter to a future lover”, to get over my mistaken expectations – I’m learning not to judge an essay by its title.  I thought it would be a “Dear Future Lover, You should know now that I like my coffee in the morning . . .”  Only after reading it two or three times did I come to see that perhaps the narrator was the future lover to whom the inscriber had written, or perhaps I was the future lover Monson had written to.  That is to say, as the narrator suggests, that anything written, a codex, to use the author’s word, is written to a future lover of sorts, or at the very least to a future reader.  As when we look at stars, we are looking into the past, so from the reader’s perspective, writing is like that too.  If a letter is written to a future lover, then in some ways the recipient is receiving it from a past lover.

The writing for this essay is just wonderful.  There is much word play: “stuffed with this stuff, the stuffing . . . (20)” Alliteration: “a day, a decade, a daze of centuries (21)” with “daze” sounding to the ear like “days.”  Rhyme: “more than mine, that’s fine . . . electric line (20).”  There are lines that reward re-reading: “Maybe the lover’s dead. Maybe the lover’s dead (21).”  I took a few re-readings to ponder the difference, rather than repetition, in those sentences.  I rather liked the line “We are always dying for the future (21),” the way we are always ‘dying to meet someone,’ but this dying for the future seems to suggest a dying to our present selves. “Otherwise it couldn’t ever come (21).”  There are lots of other lovely lines, but I think it would take too much space to point them all out.  A commentary longer than the essay, as commentaries tend to be. 

I will close with a final sentence, “We are all in wires eventually, reduced to what we said, or didn’t say, and what we wrote or didn’t write, whom we loved or didn’t love, or loved and lost and never told it except writing in or to a book (21).”  What I love about this sentence is the negative space it allows for.  More commonly we might say that we are reduced to what we said, wrote, and loved, but truly we are indeed also reduced to what we didn’t say, write, and love.