For your reading pleasure

A passage from the increasingly delightful novel Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles. The italics below are mine, except in the last case.

"In any case, I found myself nearing manhood with scant instruction on living, so for lessons I turned to books, and in books of poetry—particularly those of Baudelaire, Keats, Neruda, Lorca, Yeats, the Beats—I discovered the life I thought I wanted: heart-fueled, reckless, close to the bone, earthly existence set to a rolling, overspilling boil. Let me say upfront that this is no way to read poetry. When Neruda writes about how great it would be "to go through the streets with a green knife letting out yells" until you die of the cold, he does not intend for you to take him literally. The dearth of green knives in your neighborhood cutlery emporium ought to be clue number one, but just you try explaining that to a vulnerable seventeen-year-old. Because I loved the way words & images bounced through my head when I read poetry, the way it impelled my life as nothing else did, revved it like a floored gas pedal, I began writing it."