There are five poems at the beginning of Lucy Sante’s third collection of short pieces. I knew she started out as a poet but had never read one. I saw references to chapbooks online that were long out of print. When I asked her if there would be a poetry book forthcoming, she said these were the only good ones. I don’t know if I believe that. Sante has always been a writer of musical sentences and in these five small pieces we get to hear that music untethered from narrative. It’s an unexpected treat, like a bit of dessert before the main course.
I’ve reviewed every Sante book since 2016’s The Other Paris, but I’ve been a devoted fan of her writing a lot longer. It goes back to reading her in the New York Review of Books in the late 80s or early 90s. Those buoyant sentences have been with me since long before I attempted any writing of my own and the range of interests that were their subjects pointed me towards books, movies, and music I would have never found out about otherwise. What I’m trying to say is that Lucy Sante’s work has been very important to me for a very long time.
This new collection is full of music, pictures, and movies but some of my favorite pieces concern not pieces of art but elements of contemporary life that are fading away. There’s a saying about how we’d be happy to hear a favorite singer sing the phone book. Sante writes a touching elegy to that very publication. About what crucial role it played before the advent of the internet in day-to-day life. Another concerns the evolution of the street light. It ends with
LED can light up a nighttime scene so thoroughly that it can show all the imperfections of your skin. LEDs are interrogation lights. They are impartial and merciless like the new weather, hired muscle in the service of any entity that wants to rob you of protective darkness.
Sante shone a kind of LED on herself with her 2024 memoir. Before it, there was a kind of remove in her writing, a hesitation to reveal oneself as an active participant, to allow herself to be visible. There are references throughout this new book to the before and after of this life change but they are never the focal point. Sante’s eyes and ears are trained outward once more, it’s just that those eyes and ears are no longer in the shadows.
To read Sante’s tribute to Joseph Mitchell felt almost like something I imagined. Like Sante, Mitchell was an unassuming city wanderer, a noticer of obscure detail, a master of poetically rendering the unpoetic. Mitchell was as crucial a guiding star to me when I started trying to write as Sante was. To have them together on the same page was a little unreal.
There are many other personal resonances throughout. An obituary of James Chance tripped off a memory of catching the saxophonist on a bad night in Boston in the 90s; a piece on the mercurial Jean Eustache reminded me of my own deep dive into that filmmaker’s work a few years back on the occasion of a retrospective. Sante did not shape my tastes entirely but there is enough crossover that reading this new collection was often like reminiscing or catching up with old friends.
At the end of the book, Sante rewrites the introduction to her 1998 memoir, The Factory of Facts. That book is a fascinating yet frustrating work; a portrait with the face missing. All these years later Sante is able to put many things in a new perspective in words that could help anyone grappling to come to terms with their own history. This is what she writes about her past:
I certainly feel more affection for it from a distance. And only from within the past can I at all appreciate the present; each is a shabby, passive-aggressive dictatorship of compromise and self-delusion. Under the rhetoric, we all know this. I’m not alone because every one of us is an alien. This makes us all compatriots.
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My Heart & I Agree
by Lucy Sante
Verse Chorus Press; 288 p.