Read as a buddy read with @ayzrules. Back when I found out about this book, she made a joke about how they should have hired me to do sensitivity reading for it because I’m a poet. Just between us PBers, I probably would have skipped this one if not for my commitment to the bit. At least commiserating with a friend while reading will be a positive memory to hold onto.

To clarify, aside from calling myself a poet – which I almost fear to do at times since I could hardly dare to place myself among well-known luminaries who do the same, like Taylor Swift – I have a Masters’ of Fine Arts in Poetics and Creative Writing. Poetics is specifically the study of the making of poetry versus studying poetry as an observer. In other words, I’ve dedicated a not insignificant amount of my life thinking about why people make poetry. I wish The Poet Empress had spent some time on that, too.

Poetry has a kind of strange place of tension in the North American cultural mindset: it’s both something any over-dramatic teenage girl can do when she’s sad, and something that is elitist, inaccessible, ancient and unfailingly dull. Somehow it occupies both the spectrum of being unserious, unpolished and silly AND too serious, too strict, and too high-minded.

That being said, poetry as an ancient form of expression and record-keeping have been used in many fantasy epics as a part of world-building. There is quite a lot of precedence to find similarities between spells and poetry. The main thread of The Poet Empress - writing a poem powerful enough to kill a tyrant – is the kind of thing poets have probably been jerking themselves off to before bed every night since dawn of language.

Unfortunately I feel that the gap between ideas and execution is just too large. This book failed to move me. For all of its ambitions, what I felt most about this book was puzzled and bored.

Writing is a deliberate act of creation. Every choice made in a fantasy world is a choice that is made for the untold thousands living in the world created. World-building shouldn’t exist just to create obstacles for characters to get through, a world is a house every character lives in. So it’s frustrating when a book leans on misogyny, classism, physical and sexual abuse, but there’s huge gaps where the walls, pillars, hell, even the foundation should be. It winds up feeling arbitrary. How different would the world actually be in a world where emperors, and apparently only men, were born with magic? How would a society where all women, even nobility, were not allowed to read, even function? How did they get to that point? Maybe I missed that, but I don’t feel the society within The Poet Empress sufficiently answers how different life would be under such circumstances. What would the excuses for this obvious injustice be, and why would the main character seem to be the first one who ever made any headway rebelling against it? The Poet Empress lacks a lot of fundamental world building, leaning on the relationships between the characters and the inherent drama of the situation. Unfortunately, it also lacks the spark of passion that would make these conflicts compelling.

Emotional things happen, and Wei, the main character, experiences them, but it never quite seems to do the work of actually getting the reader there. As a poet, when I teach other poets, my biggest demand is: take me there. I don’t need you to tell me that sexism is bad and missing your family is sad, or it would hurt to get stabbed. That could happen to basically anyone on the planet. What is unique to your (or your character’s) experience, how does it feel in your body, how are all these fundamentals of human existence different when lived by you (or your character)? When a book simply states what is happening, when it fails to embody what is happening, it is expecting the reader to pick up the slack and simply insert their own feelings. This is particularly frustrating if what you think you would do in Wei’s position is vastly more angry and defiant than she appears to be.

This book takes on a somewhat strange format where Wei is essentially embarking on a research project to find what the fuck is wrong with Terren, because for Magic Poetry Reasons, if she loves him, she’ll be granted the ability to kill him. She finds out about this after he’s been a cartoonishly evil piece of shit to her for a hundred pages already. About 70-90% of this book is her finding out about things that happened to Terren before she got there. Call it the Rashomon approach, but instead of each witness directly telling their story, we actually never change perspective and just sit there with the judge explaining to us what she (Wei) just learned. This is especially egregious when so much of the story consists of other people telling her stories about Terren or her reading directly from his brother’s journal and then just recounting what she read. What exactly is the purpose of first-person if the result is simply Wei summarizing what she learns?

Yet, for all we remain firmly seated with her, I never feel as though Wei feels strongly enough about anything to do more than passively endure, and this, to me, is a failure to capture her through the prose or give her a clear voice. Details that should have already been established, or straight-up add to her backstory but weren’t discussed at all, will suddenly come up as the moment needs it. Wei’s internal landscape feels so lacking that even some of the biggest twists in the story feel like they were not hinted toward. To paraphrase BookTuber Reads with Rachel (regarding a different book), “We’re right there in first person with you. It’s not a twist, you lied to us.”

Wei is also that specific type of heroine where it genuinely seems like the misogyny exists to keep her down specifically, and every other woman around her is either a victim or a bitch. The narrative feels more than a bit conservative with its views on how women might obtain power through sexuality, framing this as scheming and negative. The only queer act committed in this entire book is done by a woman trying to gain advantage, which is frankly pretty sickening.

Actually, now that I think about it, it might just be that this book takes a dim view on everyone generally, as victims of abuse are all more or less treated the same way, either they’re complete victims or they’re monsters because of it. There’s basically not a single bit of examination on the existence of court eunuchs while the courtesan system is framed as inherently unfair.

I understand that Terren is meant to be a character who is evil but complicated, but he lacked any hooks to make him compelling, which means that all of this digging into his past doesn’t amount to much. He is so lacking in vulnerability or charm that it is impossible to care about him even a little. The crumbs we get about him are too little, too late, and don’t feel super insightful into the things he’s experienced. He kills some animals but not all of them. He wishes he could be someone or something else so he could avoid suffering. These are all passive observations by Wei, she rarely connects with him aside from his frequent physical violence – and even that stops being shocking early on because how little it leans into the pain and horror of it.

I honestly don’t have much to say about the large action-set-piece ending except that it all wrapped up pretty quickly and in a way I didn’t find very convincing. But I didn’t find the book to be convincing in general.

This one fell flat for me, folks. Surprisingly little poetry. I found it un-empressing.

Despite what my name might suggest, I don’t consider myself a particularly macabre person. My interest in death as a concept always sneaks up on me and takes me by surprise. I think it’s largely been an existential interest, because I’ve long subscribed to the idea that living close to endings helps keep you honest. I make all my decisions in a way that helps me know I’d be proud if I never got to make another one. I call my family regularly and invest heavily in my loved ones because I know I won’t always have them. To quote the song Green Grass by Ellie Dixon: “Coffee goes cold, so you better drink all of it.”

Death is my friend, so to hear Gawande repeat multiple times that “death is the enemy” was jarring. What do you mean? Why make an enemy of something that equally never asked to exist? It is not Death’s fault that we have so much angst and dread about it that goes beyond simple animal fear. Humans are one of a handful of species who mourn their dead via ritual—among elephants, dolphins, some other primates, and (perhaps) corvids—and while that’s beautiful, it’s also atypical for an animal. We invent increasingly creative ways to solve medical problems that our ancestors would perhaps be equal parts amazed and horrified to behold, and I think speaking to that is the real strength of Being Mortal.

Through personal anecdote, case studies, and intimate editorializing, Gawande beautifully articulates the need for medical practitioners to take a hard look at their entire philosophy of practice, without forgetting that the majority of his audience will be the patients looking to them for answers. The question is deceptively simple: what happens if you admit some things can’t be fixed? He establishes quickly the typical training and viewpoints of medical practitioners, whose entire jobs seem to revolve around fixing things that are broken. When met with something that can’t be fixed, the two common responses are to drop it like a hot potato, or to continue forcing a solution to coalesce.

This is where suffering is created, because what is less fixable than aging? What more assured than death? And when death is the enemy, the lengths a person will go in the name of stealing even a few more days from such finality can be devastating to everything they hold dear. People are sold tickets to a lottery they have almost no hope of winning because we struggle to have hard conversations about the reality of existence: that nothing lasts forever. Gawande’s primary advocacy is not to stop trying to beat the odds, but to make sure we give people the tools to decide what’s worth it to them. To create a space where it’s safe to contemplate what happens when we eventually, inevitably fail. To recognize when the hard decisions we have to make in medicine no longer align with the minimum quality of life we want for ourselves.

This book make me cry so many times, ranging from “who’s cutting onions?” to full-blown head back, tears streaming, completely bereft as he describes patients and their stories in ways that feel both informative and personal. You can feel the care he has for the people he speaks about, especially when he talks about the death of his own father. He implicates himself as being part of the problem he names, and he ends by illustrating the solution, even if the solution means peaceful surrender. There is so much we can do before that point, though. We talk about healthcare outcomes for marginalized communities, and I pray that more people can live long lives, but the elderhood that awaits so many of us needs improvements. The end of life care that reduces suffering for the terminally ill needs to be advocated for. In the end, death doesn’t have to be scary, if we’re willing to have the hard conversations before they become impossible ones.

I’m going to end my thoughts with a quote from Twitter I kept thinking about as I read this book:

i hope death is like being carried to your bedroom when you were a child & fell asleep on the couch during a family party. i hope you can hear the laughter from the next room