Little Boy Blue by Gray Jacobik
It is, at first, incredibly difficult to give Gray Jacobik’s Little Boy Blue the time it deserves. One long poem separated into a series of “movements,” this “memoir in verse” about a mother’s relationship with her bipolar son shatters any lingering definitions of confessional poetry or memoir, going beyond both to create a book that is stronger than either genre alone usually produces. Because of this, and because of the narrative drive of the memoir, the desire to find out what happens can override the urge to sit with a movement for a moment, to re-read, to wonder.