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Tony Hoagland's What Narcissism Means to Me has moments that are brilliant, tender, sweet, biting, and funny, but I don't know if I love it. I suppose it doesn't matter either way.

I don't remember loving the beginning. I may have started reading when I was too tired to absorb much, but that was my initial experience, and every read is even a little different.

The book is from Graywolf Press, like Nick Flynn's Some Ether, which I loved for its tone, the way it turned trauma into something magical.

Hoagland's voice is recognizable, too, but not alluring like Flynn's. The style and form fit me, I think. The poems are mostly narrative, interpretations of a phone call or dinner with a friend, for instance.

But I made the mistake I often make and thought of Marie Howe and What the Living Do, because she is thanked in the book and a Marie appears in a few poems. What Narcissism Means to Me is not about that kind of trauma and change, not like Some Ether, either, which begin with a father sexual assaulting a daughter and a mother committing suicide, respectively. What Narcissism Means to Me, in general, does not cope with that kind of heavy shit. This is not that level of trauma and change, and that's perfectly fine, because I love a variety of poems, not just those dealing with stunning violation and heartbreaking loss. I just want to experience the same level of sting because of the writing, the tone, what the writer does to you, not just what has happened to the writer. Art is meant to affect or effect. Whether AIDS, for instance, appears in one poem or is under the surface of every one is not important in itself, but the way the writer makes the poems work individually and as a whole are what attract me to books.

I remember the beginning as having a vagueness that didn't allow me to love the book obsessively. It wasn't stinging me, the only demand I make on what I read. I say "love" a lot when talking about poems, because writing should happen from love in some way, whatever the subject, because writers love to create poems.

In "Rap Music," he has me hooked, then loses me with stupid, easy, annoying rhymes, which may have been his commentary on rap music, but then I love the closing. Hoagland never completely loses me, either. I never want to throw the book. "Suicide Song" describes the little details of life in which to find happiness and affirms the shifting mind of a poet as something beautiful. "Fire," the first Tony Hoagland poem I knew, is still awesome. But then there's "Physiology of Kisses," as preciously lame as it sounds.

The most common imagery is of trains and metaphors using them, but I don't remember any of them offhand. There is a typo on page 66. The last word of the book is "kisses." This is a problem. But what bothered me about parts of Narcissism is that I've seen my teachers and friends do it so much better, and their books are not available yet. This is only about parts of the book; Hoagland obviously knows how to write exceptionally and how to teach, but this book won't stay with me in the way that others have.

I can, however, recommend it. It's a book of range, of different lives and worlds we individually live and know and love, or have no choice but to do so, because we are alive.