Courtney’s erotic, erosive soldier’s psalms enunciate the guilt of doing what one can with the awful gift of a human life in the aftermath of another’s destruction, “building a new language / from what you left inside. What more definitive shape of haunting is there, This, Sisyphus implores, than finding the beloved imbuing that one element which overwhelms the recognizable world-Ocean, contained and unappeasable in all forms conventional and nonce, carnal and inanimate. Trenchant, Achillean mourning soaks this book’s extraordinary sonic terrain with its indelible weight. Danez Smith, author of Don’t Call Us Dead and boy And the fact that he CAN be happy means that no matter how bad your life is because it can no way be as bad as his you can manifest happiness in. It's not a contradiction to say that Sisyphus was happy about his lot. Written exquisitely and vulnerably, this is a book for anyone seeking to wander back towards the light after travelling through Death’s valley. Camus says, 'We can imagine Sisyphus happy.' And the word I want to focus on is the 'can.' You CAN imagine Sisyphus happy. Such a deep well of grief matched with such a high zenith of lyric, just as it should be. My lord, folks, the language Courtney has found here interrupted me. Whether wrestling God or trying to make sense and sound out of grief, Brandon Courtney’s This, Sisyphus is a bright, urgent addition to the elegiac canon. ![]() ![]() Composed of four sections, This, Sisyphus is a rejection of Leibniz’s "best possible world,” and, more importantly, it is the author’s transubstantiated epiphany that, ultimately, in tragedy and suffering, we have only each other. Centered on the death and subsequent repatriation of a sailor who was the author’s lover and closest friend, this collection moves beyond elegiac gestalt, questioning instead a God who created an imperfect world in which death is possible and inevitable. ![]() Metaphysical in scope, transcendent in language, This, Sisyphus makes malleable received forms and rhyme to articulate what it means to face incalculable loss.
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