Description
What happens when you ask contemporary poets to look into the cracked mirror of David Lynch's work? Fix Your Hearts or Die! is an exuberant, eccentric collection of original essays that probe Lynch's surreal cinematic spaces, written for anyone who has ever been haunted by the Red Room. Edited by poet, translator, and essayist John Wall Barger, Fix Your Hearts or Die! celebrates the great director by letting poets loose on his films, in whatever innovative form they choose, like ants swarming a picnic blanket. The essays range from erudite to restless, from witty to transgressive, revealing each poet's voice, poetics, and worldview. They use Lynch to tell time, to measure age, to meditate on film as personal expression and pop-culture milestone, and to celebrate a much-beloved—and dearly missed—artistic icon. Stephanie Bolster's deeply personal essay describes Twin Peaks as a kind of bildungsroman: a path out of childhood isolation into a shared aesthetic world where her own strangeness became a source of power. Alina Stefanescu—analyzing the imagery of scissors in film, poetry, and theater—teaches us that "Lynch makes worlds of fracture and sound." Micheline Maylor sees Blue Velvet as an all-American Eastern religious allegory in which the protagonist Jeffrey must apply karmic action to avoid hell-realms and transcend to higher states of consciousness. Zach Savich's lyric essay, on deer in The Straight Story, is written in the mode of a David Antin–esque "talk poem." Adrienne Su, inspired by Lynch's YouTube video on how to cook quinoa, teaches us, through a variety of quinoa recipes, "How to Cook like an Artist." Fix Your Hearts or Die! invites readers into each writer's way of thinking, in a style more akin to an extended conversation than to conventional criticism. The essays grapple with Lynch not as a puzzle that needs solving, but as a mysterious and powerful force whose art resists being fully captured by language.