The Unbecoming

A dazzling meditation on the limits of life from a poet whose “mind is endless with depth and truth” (Brenda Shaughnessy).

On a sketch of the Virgin and Child, Michelangelo instructed his young assistant, in shorthand Italian, to Draw faster, acknowledging that life lasts a moment, death—and art—far longer.

As an aging, bi, childless poet currently recognizing the limits of her own life and that of our planet, Kathy Fagan has immersed herself in the intimate and urgent discovery that growth and decay are the same cycle, and that art and memory, made in the tumultuous rush of these, are the deeply human attempts to outlast them.

Fagan’s luminous seventh collection, The Unbecoming, begins with the sequence “Listening to Others,” and a command: Run, into a process that is, for all of us, a circle of becoming and unbecoming simultaneously. Favoring perspective over nostalgia and clarity over certainty, the poems are, then, memento mori, a loving reminder, a poet’s reckoning with the rewards and losses of age, and with our painfully beautiful little lives “rounded with a sleep.”

From “Listening to Others”:

People used to say, soaking wet, they’d got caught
in the rain: a sudden downpour: the pouring rain.
The rain is constant, I wrote in a postcard once,
perhaps from here. I was fifteen, and on the tour bus,
where I could crush on her best, was a girl named Rain,
who napped on her brother’s shoulder as we drove. I didn’t
long to be the shoulder: I didn’t wish I were the girl:
I needed a face for my own true soul, is how I’d put it
to myself: and it was hers I wanted, not mine.