The Grand Valley

The best book I have read in years-profound, charismatic, and funny. It makes you happy to be able to read and to play out the life you are, even if selfhood is an absurd endeavor and even if ""Life"" per se really isn't something that you should try to write about. Meis doesn't ""try,"" and yet what emerges is a shimmering story of existence, via Joan Mitchell, big valleys, Gertrude Stein, foliage, Carl Jung, Aeneas and Dido, the color blue, fuckfests, Lord Chandos, dogwalkers, water lilies. Utterly absorbing. -Jane Bennett, author of Influx & Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman With The Grand Valley, Morgan Meis is back with another one of his topsy-turvy, loop-de-loop joyrides of an appreciation. This time his ostensible subject is Joan Mitchell (on whom he is very good), but Claude Monet, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Heloise and Abelard, Carl Jung, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, among others, all get roped in to compoundingly delirious effect. Indeed, this thin volume is one long prose poem, and Meis is Mitchelling away, doing in thinking and writing-thrusting, daubing, scritching and scratching, keening, recanting, abreacting, dis-individuating, becoming present and nothing else-exactly what he's shown us Mitchell herself was doing with her great painting series. It's all dazzling to watch, and in the end quite devastating. -Lawrence Weschler, author of Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees and the Wondercabinet Substack Once again, Morgan Meis shows he's one of the most perceptive, interesting, and inventive critics working today. I'll read anything by him-and so, I implore, should you. -Tom Bissell, author of Apostle and Magic Hours