You Kiss by th' Book

Book excerpt: Inspired by Shakespeare, an award-winning poet creates “smart, surprising and affecting [poetry] . . . Poems that are easy to read and difficult to forget” (David Scott Kastan, Yale University). In his engaging new collection, National Book Award finalist Gary Soto creates poems that each begin with a line from Shakespeare and then continue in Soto’s fresh and accessible verse. Drawing on moments from the sonnets, Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and others, Soto illuminates aspects of the source material while taking his poems in directions of their own, strategically employing the color of “thee” and “thine,” kings, thieves, and lovers. The results are inspired, by turns meditative, playful, and moving, and consistently fascinating for the conversation they create between the bard’s time and language and our own here and now. “I read Gary Soto’s poems with delight. There’s no one I know, certainly in this language, who writes like him.” —Gerald Stern, National Book Award–winning poet “Soto insists on the possibility of a redemptive power, and he celebrates the heroic, quixotic capacity for survival in human beings and the natural world.” —Publishers Weekly “Gary Soto is a consummate storyteller . . . Intelligent, funny, and bitingly honest. He is also a craftsman, a master of metaphor and simile, his language capable of dazzling somersaults.” —Martin Espada, National Book Award–winning poet “Shakespeare’s words are never more alive than when they are being seized upon, twisted, remade and made anew. Gary Soto, a brilliant recycler, has laden his ship with old gold. Himself a brilliant recycler, Shakespeare might well have been pleased.” —The Norton Shakespeare