Unpleasantries: Considerations of Difficult Questions

Soos (Bamboo Fly Rod Suite), the 2015-2016 Alaska writer laureate, combines essays published over the last 25 years with previously unpublished content in a collection that uses the random occurrences of life to jump-start discursive, folksy explorations of philosophy, literature, and being. Soos’s writing has a daisy-chain quality, drawing connections between ideas seemingly at random or through “sideways questioning.” The reader, once accustomed to the style, will find the rewards plentiful. Whether using a non-injurious car accident to contemplate Jorge Luis Borges and alternate realities (“Upside-Down with Borges and Bob”) or finding echoes of the art of essay-writing in the paintings of Jackson Pollock and in his own work handcrafting a boat (“I Built a Little Boat; or, The Necessity of Failure”), Soos delights by finding unusual ways to ask big questions. The essays come from across a wide range of time and often plumb personal history, so some retelling occurs, but this feels less like repetition than like viewing the same image from another vantage point. Even those essays that don’t reach the same heights of beauty and insight as the best selections still engage and entertain. (June)