In the rare moments of hope, the novel suggests that beauty and solace are to be found in intimacy and friendship. In many ways, this is where Rooney is most convincing: amidst global despair, maybe the only place to find comfort is in our personal relationships. For all the glib quips, self-ironizing, and existential angst, Beautiful World is a sincere, entertaining novel with a happy ending. Is this enough?

So it’s not just that poets love trees, which we already knew, but that, to paraphrase Colin Tudge in his natural history of The Tree: no trees, no civilization. They’re everywhere in art because they’re everywhere in human existence—trees gave us shelter, fuel, boats, drugs, food, weapons, tools, places of worship. And, of course, paper, on which to write poems.

Every day, I labor to hope
that the ocean stays unskinned
of its ice and you always have water
to spare.

When I first heard “The Middle” as a ninety-eight-pound, barely-kissed fifteen-year-old, it sounded retro yet unmanipulated—a squeaky-clean nonconformity we could take for our own. 

History is easier when seen close
up, the detail is in the moment, then.
And this is the look of our lives,
stare long enough, all tangential
narratives become annoying
blurs, feathery inconveniences.

What was it about these places that drew people to them? That drew me to them? Armchair travel, sure. But, also, something more. These places swallowed people up. I wanted to visit them all. Instead, I did the next best thing: I added and added to the list.

A plane cut through the stars above. For a moment, Jenna wondered where it was going, how far it had come, where it would take her if it beamed down a chute of light and suddenly sucked her up.

Later, we would know these items by their proper names and what they were meant to summon. But because we happened upon these items when we were eleven, maybe twelve, we were on our own to make sense of these secreted collections, which rendered our mothers mysterious and complex—frightening and enthralling at once.

Aunt B came every week, at the exact same time, into a living room taken over by evening’s shadows. Yet she never relented. She came with a blatant hope, a desperateness, at the dark end of daylight, only to turn around disappointed and sadly make her way back—to once again endure her own life.

People say equality is what matters in a marriage but that’s not the case, is it. What matters is respect. And for him I had respect for days. I knew he would never aim the gun at me.

Woundwondered, they circle

you: headless monument erosion had—
before they thought they knew you though did not—
claimed.

When morning lights the world, Venus and Juno
and Hymen come together for the wedding.
And the boy Iphis now has his Ianthe. 

The great mystery
is whether I love you or
I just love mourning.