The essays in this book model the poet’s no: they refuse to make things easy when they aren’t, preserving the messy difficulty of cancer, of poverty, of staying alive under capitalism ... Boyer creates a taxonomy of refusal, tracing its lineage through the geography of Kansas City, the economies of illness, the incarnations of lust, and the music of Bo Diddley, Fats Domino, and Mary J. Blige ... The essays are, like most good and true things, equal parts painful and funny, and never more so than when confronting the commodification of the body, heart, and language ... Reading these essays, I was reminded of the origin of the word essay, which, as Montaigne tells us, means to try. Boyer’s pieces are essays in the purest sense of the word. They are brave in their attempts to refuse the promises, words, and visions of the world as it is, and instead, to attempt to demand a better one.

A Handbook of Disappointed Fate is filled with...allusive and subtle replies; the book envelops its critical objects, shears tucked in the wool of the lamb. It is full in the sense that you can return to sentences you thought familiar to find that their light has shifted, or trace their shadows across the pages as the essays turn toward and away from each other and any concepts or conceptual structure they purport to share ... Boyer positions herself against the dialectic of master and slave, or man and woman, against reproduction based on force, against society ruled by exchange ... Boyer’s distrust—of writing in particular, of the world’s bullshit in general—sharpens as it unfurls forms of expression within and against a language bent toward assent, forms of living a kind of life that constantly feels refused.

Boyer’s negativity is capacious, incorporating explicit political action as well as more opaque forms of noncompliance ... Those who tire of poetry’s defensive gestures are right to be wary of this position, too—of the appeal of refusing to appeal. As it has at every juncture, disavowal threatens to congeal into its own brand, to be leveraged by the savvy oppositional poet into academic appointments and fellowship funding. Boyer recognizes this bind, but she’s not content to bemoan it ... Much of Handbook’s energy derives from Boyer’s recurrent efforts to exhume that yes; much of my investment as a reader was sustained by the desire to understand it better ... Boyer is avowedly idiosyncratic in her reading and listening, foraging across cultural history for teachers and comrades ... The resulting book only occasionally devolves into vagueness; it’s more often thrilling to follow Boyer as she modulates her governing ethic of refusal across referents and scales. Despite its breadth of inquiry, questions about poetry itself reemerge across Handbook, often surprisingly and usually affixed to an essay’s apparent subject—as metonyms, instances of cross-pollination, or sources of potential resolution ... Boyer struggles...to write a literature of both counteraspirational survival and its flagrantly unreal future, linking the impossibility of poetry to the impossibility of the present.

Anne Boyer’s A Handbook of Disappointed Fate roams, and then rages, like a graceful and passionate animal in heat ... She has an opinion on almost anything, I wager; she offers so many of them here, across so many different contexts, that reading the book leaves the reader mentally worn out, ready for a bag of Cheetos and the shallowest sitcom possible. And she disburses all of it with the same crystalline, unerring language, the consistency of which forms the durable connective tissue of this collection ... Boyer knows her stuff—she footnotes dutifully—and presents a tone of insistent intellectual rigor throughout. But the enormous range of topics, and the speed with which she covers them (many essays are between three and five pages, some much shorter), make this collection feel chaotic, ill at ease with itself. Every sentence is stuffed with meaning, and the sentences build relentlessly. The poet’s gift for compression contributes to the buzz each essay sets up in the reader’s brain, but Boyer’s evident, blazing intelligence doesn’t hurt ... Boyer is also funny ... I’ll read this book, and read it, and read it, well into the future, again and again. But not too quickly.

What sets Boyer apart from writers like her isn’t just that her work retains a political edge, refusing to refashion those frustrations into literature proper. It’s also that genre itself is always in question when it comes to her writings—is it essay or poetry, aesthetic or critical? How can writing resist its own passivity as a consumable object? As a question of cultural economy, it’s the classic artist’s lament about the commodification of their art, but Boyer prefers to ask the political form of the question: how does one write in good faith when words themselves are a condition of immiseration? ... . If these are essays, one gets the sense that Boyer’s definition of an essay is just poetry spilled out onto the page, an excess of words that can only be contained by the page’s margins ... Anne Boyer should be considered a properly American poet: not because she captures a national essence, but because she captures a democratic one ... If it’s true that when the chips are down, we won’t really need Marx, it’s because we will have writers like Boyer who, laboring in a world in want of repair, might give a sleeping sovereign a start.

A Handbook of Disappointed Fate is an intense collection of essays—fables and manifestos collected from over a decade of Anne Boyer’s work—serving as both a scathing critique of and a brilliant testament to daily existence under the physical realities of oppressive structures. Her writing is relentlessly focused on the material and philosophical problems of writing and living in the contemporary world: A Handbook encompasses systemic oppression, the ethical imperatives of writing about it, the effects it has on the insistently material human body—all things circling the drain of Boyer’s personal experience ... This sounds lofty, but A Handbook is actually emphatically grounded in the realities of modern life, and seasoned with a generous dose of wit ... She uses what often feels like a tone of clinical remove and detachment to better analyze that which affects her directly, and no word is wasted: the sense is that she cannot afford inexact sentiments, practicing an economy of affect. Her writing curiously occupies the space between personal and impersonal ... Rather than attempt to succeed or exceed the inadequacies of language, Boyer’s writing operates within them, inside the space opened between the material and its linguistic depiction. The material exists in a territory outside of language; thus, Boyer brings her language to the territory of the material.