Though the book is marketed as a hybrid memoir and Crampton’s story serves as an anchor, her experiences make up a fairly small proportion of A Body Made of Glass. The book ranges comprehensively not only through the history of hypochondria, but also through hypochondria’s appearances in books and culture, from early modern literature to Woody Allen films to Jane Austen’s Mrs. Bennet (and Austen’s own mother). I found myself bringing up the book to nearly everyone I spoke to during the time I was reading it, both because I found it fascinating and because it contained some element I felt would appeal to each person’s specific interests.
I didn’t have full command of Spanish as an undergrad translating poems of Jorge Guillén. Still, I was surprised my versions “sounded” authoritative when published without the originals. What is the sound of authority? I discovered then and there that all commanding poems read as translations “after a lost original,” to quote a David Shapiro book title.
Our experience of—and existence in—nature is universal, if rarely identical. As part of her historic tenure as the 24th US Poet Laureate, Ada Limón commissioned some of the finest poets of our era to write to perhaps the most pressing issue of our time, in an anthology that is uniformly intimate, if diverse in subject matter. The collection also serves as a starting point for a National Parks project that comingles these literary offerings with poetic “exhibits” in seven national parks.
This latest collection resembles a scrapbook of still-fresh memories—miscellaneous, uneven, and indispensable. I wanted to spend time, alongside the author, focusing on the practices and legacies of figures like Hilton Als, Prince, Tala Madani, Kara Walker, Fred Moten, and Nayland Blake.