TAKE THE EXIT: ON WRITING BOOK DESCRIPTIONS

with the impossible to describe brilliance of Hannah Matheson, Associate Director & Senior Editor at Four Way Books

I have had the pleasure of working on several books with Hannah Matheson at Four Way Books and I’m always astonished by her ability to describe what a book is doing. As well as being an incredible editor, an evocative writer (Ross White of Bull City Press and I always gush about her future stardom!), a smart publicity advocate, she also writes the best book descriptions in the game.

When I read what she’s written about a book I’m doing the future publicity for, I’m like welp—can’t describe it better than Hannah, so now what? After I wrote a brief little piece on book descriptions a few weeks ago, I thought I would call in the big dawgs (Hannah!) and pick her brain on how she does it. I think you’ll see from this conversation why her book descriptions, and literally everything else she does, makes her a masterpiece, creative human.

Hannah Matheson, you’ll want to know her name!

Cassie: Hannah, I’m so excited to talk with you about all the things you do for books at Four Way Books, but especially what I think is some of the strongest marketing copy I’ve read in my work with independent presses. I’m always enchanted by what you write about the books you work on, and what most people would call “summary” or “synopsis,” you’re able to draw me into both brilliant little kernels of text (and subtext) alongside the real-world, larger implications of what a book is doing. It’s such a hard balancing act, and you always do it with such grace.

So, I’m curious to start with–because I imagine you’re quite a close reader–what does reading for work look like for you? When you know you’ll have to translate a book to an audience, what habits do you employ or what ways of reading work for you to get into that mode?

Hannah: First of all, thank you so much for your kind words — they truly mean so much to me, especially coming from you! One of the supreme honors of my life as someone who loves literature is that the initial stages of reading for work are quite similar to reading for pleasure. Before I approach a book from a consciously analytical perspective, I read it at least three times with no agenda but to experience and notice the text as freely as I can. This impulse I think comes from the understanding of what teachers taught us in lower school when telling us to hold our questions until the end: you can’t really listen if you’re holding your hand up and rehearsing what you’re going to say inside your head while someone else is speaking. I believe that, when I’m looking to establish or confirm a certain perspective before I’ve immersed myself in a project, my own seeking crowds out vital subliminal processing and obscures a book’s abundance of meaning.

When I allow myself to begin this way, it also liberates me from the anxiety of “getting it wrong” — I can’t fail by reading. And then, after going through the text several times, I’ve tricked myself into starting without realizing it — that fear of dishonoring or misinterpreting projects I care deeply about has less of a hold of me at that point because, inevitably, spending unpressured time sitting with the words themselves means thoughts have organically risen to the surface. At this stage, I’ll try to pin down the patterns and overarching resonances I see, making more intentional annotations throughout the manuscript and seeing how they constellate. From there, I can start actually writing the description, drawing on the singular details that make the work uniquely effective while also hoping to represent the book’s wholeness.

I’m kind of laughing at myself giving this response right now, because it seems absurd that you asked a simple (and professional) question and I accidentally descended into psychoanalyzing myself. But that’s also why I loved what you asked — because it led me to really ruminate on my relationship to “working in the arts,” which can sound paradoxical because of the opposing nuances of work as a means of literal survival, a self-alienating exercise in labor to serve capital, and of art as a means of spiritual affirmation, a self-actualizing outlet of pleasure and expression, an anti-economy: the ultimate freedom of choosing to invest in something that isn’t strictly necessary but that creates a surplus of significance. It feels like an immense privilege to have a job that allows me to interact daily with art, which is life-sustaining and brings me closer to myself and to others. And so even thinking about how I approach reading, and where my mind went as I thought about that, showed me once again that moving forward and doing justice to these books usually depends on me relinquishing my own shame. A book description is not a test to fail or a public presentation of possible misunderstanding but an opportunity to write toward what speaks directly to you, to attempt to capture the love and wonder that someone else’s art has wrought in you.

CMM: This response walloped me. (And for the record, to people reading this–it took me days to reply because I didn’t even know how or what I would say). The sentences about “working in the arts” I might frame for my office.

I love that what I’m reading from this is that rather than go into a book thinking you’ll be in conversation with the author or narrator or subject or text–as in a dialogue, you come in simply to listen, to notice. That’s so beautiful. I do think sometimes I find myself reading with a hidden agenda, and maybe not so much a formula (though sometimes it does feel that way), but I know I have to translate a book in an intriguing (perhaps, convincing?) way, and so I go into a book (for work) reading for opportunities that trigger that intrigue. And what you’re saying feels so much more organic to me, and tells of how deeply you think and write about the books you work on.

I also very much connect with the idea about relinquishing shame and the anxiety of “getting it wrong.” It’s interesting because I get iterations, and can generate and revise as I go with pitches. So, I know the first one I’m sending will never look like the last one, or the order of information is going to change, or the quotes I use, or based on feedback I get from readers (earnest, short feedback usually) I try to figure out what’s resonating most and then make that more prominent in a pitch, but what you do with marketing copy / synopsis / book copy lives on a book–it’s most people’s first or second experience of the book before even opening to the words of an author.

When you called it “an attempt to capture” I thought about both how momentous and momentary this all is. (That released some shame for me right there!). And you’re so smart at distilling the depth of a book into 300 words–as if a sort of moment in time.

Do you find when you sit down to write about a book that there are beats you want to hit in the description, things you repeat in every description you do, or ways of opening that are similar?

HJM: Yes, I definitely find myself drawn to a certain choreography in these introductions to each title — and I’m still navigating how much that familiar structure is useful, as an understood form and invitation to approach the text, and how much a recognizable rhetorical gesture might read as a scripted or prescriptive, derivative of contemporary literary marketing or insistent upon a particular reading.

On the one hand, a book description is formulaic so that the project is legible; it serves the purpose of telling potential readers what a book is, what it is about, and what it is for (in other words, what is its form, what are its concerns, and what is its impact). The rest should remain to the reader’s singular experience! On the other hand, following a pattern too closely can fail to distinguish what makes a title unique, especially if it reads as rote praise. Oft-repeated words lose meaning. How many think pieces have we gotten lately about the unreliability of blurbs? If I see that someone called a debut “urgent,” do I believe the endorsement of this book as a timely, insightful intervention in a complex subject, or do I react first to the buzzword, subliminally getting the impression that this recommendation defaulted to a kind of cultural shorthand that goes through the motions of contributing to literary criticism without actually articulating a discernible perspective?

Of course, I’m also playing myself here — if you comb through my book descriptions, you will see that I’m a repeat offender when it comes to the “vital,” “luminous,” and “stunning” hype of it all. It would be, I think, impossible to avoid all buzzwords, mainly because the zeitgeist seized them in the first place to access and then co-opt the profound meaning they originally had. Sometimes we need to use the word we mean, even if it has entered the pop-marketing lexicon.

The same is true for following the general “recipe” of a book description. I guess what I try to do is ground myself in the “why” — what makes this book urgent? What mechanisms effectively make it so? What does the reader need to know about how this book could contribute to their life in order to pick it up and engage with it on its own terms?

Specifics always help me get started; I’ll either get down to the nitty gritty (the who, what, why, as in “a collection of elegies for the natural world which access mourning to reveal the extent of our ecological crisis and galvanize individual action toward structural change”) or open with a hook from the text. Presenting the quote before the summarization or analysis allows the work to demonstrate its own qualities better than I could describe them, and it creates a foothold for me to contextualize an excerpt and point beyond it to the broader project. The body proceeds from there, providing opportunities to elaborate on theme and form alongside snippets from the book itself.

I struggle most to resist performativity, or reliance on my own rhetorical habits, as I write the ending. For both fiction and poetry, the description’s conclusion has to have a certain kind of closure — suggesting a takeaway, or “so what,” that gives a sense of completion to the copy itself — while also arriving at an opening, leaving the heart of the matter for the reader to discover and enticing them to begin the journey with the book itself.

This moment — the final gesture —puts on display the fundamental contradiction of language that makes me love literature, the record of it as a litany of failures to achieve perfect expression that only proves the eternity of that desire. To me, that any book exists at all revokes the despair of futility; what nobility there is in doing something anyway... To have a cherished flaw instead of nothing. It reminds me of Mary Oliver in “A Pretty Song” writing, “this is earth, / our heaven, for a while.” In “The Rejection of Closure,” Lyn Hijenian theorizes that although “language induces a yearning for comprehension,” even falling short establishes boundaries: “While failing in the attempt to match the world, we discover structure, distinc­tion, the integrity and separateness of things.” I love that frame of infinite possibility, the reminder that “the undifferentiated is one mass, the dif­ferentiated is multiple.”

When I come to a close, I perhaps veer too far from having a definitive interpretation; in creating that opening, I think I tend to skew the uncertainty of any “differentiated multitude” as inherently hopeful. And that’s something I should probably watch for, lest it come off manipulative, sentimental, misleading, or predictable. It’s probably a bias from my relationship to literature, my belief that even the most nihilistic sort is a truly hopeful thing — the materiality of the book is evidence of effort, a way of trying that is not for nothing even if the subject is doom. But I never want that metatextual ideology to override the message or mood of an author’s singular work or to become such an expected transition that it fails to have any impact at all.

We could look at a book we worked on together — Bianca by Eugenia Leigh. I remember loving this book SO much that I felt terrified to write about it, feeling I couldn’t mimic the searing magic of her poetics or encapsulate the depth and breadth of her subject matter. I think that’s how I landed on quoting these confessional lines in the intro, which allows the description to piggyback off the clear yet provocative admission to briefly summarize the topics in her book and their significance: “I thought I forgave you,” Eugenia Leigh tells the specter of her father in Bianca. “Then I took root and became / someone’s mother.” Leigh’s gripping second collection introduces us to a woman managing marriage, motherhood, and mental illness as her childhood abuse resurfaces in the light of “this honeyed life.” I should note, too, that the second sentence here is a distillation of and improvement on my first draft that Eugenia herself provided.

And I love so much that you mention tinkering with the copy, the ability to “generate and revise” as the book’s publicity cycle evolves. Because editing is as much a part of this as it is any writing! My first ending for Bianca’s book description was too absolute and saccharine, actually. It read as: A gnostic bible of her manic alter ego, these poems form the gospel of Bianca: “what we all called her,” “my fever, my havoc, my tilt.” This register not only recovers and reconsiders Leigh’s experiences before understanding them in the context of PTSD and Bipolar Disorder, it documents the labyrinth she wandered to break from an inherited cycle and accept love. Recommitting daily to this life, Bianca moves into a future once considered foregone. “I expected to die much younger than I am now,” Leigh writes from the uncanny awe of now as she catalogs the newness of her days — the wingspan of “every quiet and colossal joy.” Eugenia provided a gracious and much needed alteration. Her email said: “I was also hoping to convey some of the conflicted self who is still struggling to reconcile that difference between the past and the present, and while the ‘accept love’ / ‘newness of her days’ parts feel so romantic and hopeful (and like something I want), I feel hesitant telling readers to expect that level of resolution/hope if that makes sense. Lastly, while I admired how lyrical the original was, I was also hoping to have the copy reflect some of the plainer, more colloquial voice/language in the book.” She suggested the version that became the genius final copy, ending instead like this: These poems recover and reconsider Leigh’s girlhood and young adulthood with the added context of PTSD and Bipolar Disorder. They document the labyrinth of a woman breaking free from the cycle of abuse, moving from anger to grief, from self-doubt to self-acceptance. Bianca is ultimately the testimony of one woman’s daily recommitment to this life. To living. “I expected to die much younger than I am now,” Leigh writes, in awe of the strangeness of now, of “every quiet and colossal joy.”

CMM: Ugh, the script is my fear too, but then I want to acknowledge that the emails I send (pitches) ARE an ask, and should introduce that I’m pitching a book even if every time I want to do something funky and fresh. It’s like pursuing ingenuity while realizing there is a tradition, or a form. I’m sure this is how writers think about queries–there’s a form, but you want to stand out!

I love, love, love that you pulled out “concerns” and “impact” here as part of a book’s description. I find so often that book descriptions stop at the “what this is” or even “what this book is doing”--but by “doing” I don’t mean an action or any sort of propulsive act and more of a default to those cultural buzzwords you drop (so eloquently) in that second paragraph. What DOES urgent mean as a term when we’re talking about a work that likely took years in the making (and may be specifically timed or accidentally timed to a moment) and I just wonder what it means to loop “urgency” in with say … deep research. How do those two words work together, and what does it signal? Ta Nehesi Coates most recent book would get an “urgent” descriptor, I think, yet he documented and analyzed a history that has been ongoing for centuries. So, urgent in context to whom and what?

And yes, the recipe! Woof. I always think my pitches are so different from one another and then I find myself loving a certain way to open. But same on specifics, specifics are ALWAYS better (for me) than anything else in a book description. We don’t need to know the book is about motherhood AT LARGE, we need to know the specifics to THIS writer. Those general book pitches–I always try to steer writers away from them and it’s a difficult part of the process for me, actually. At that stage sometimes, writers are thinking in “headlines” or what they want the book to SAY as in BILLBOARD, and I want the smaller stories behind the headlines, behind the phrase “care work” or “evangelical” or “body dysmorphia”--the humanity behind this phrasing (the tangible, visceral humanity!). Am I saying I want human touch? ACK!

The hope I feel reading about your process is such a similar hope to what you mention here. I also love the infinitude of how a book could be described (or any work of art really), and yet that part scares me so much. Zoe and I talk often about the idea that a pitch can feel like getting it “right” when in reality, it’s the exact opposite thing I’m trying to do. I’m not trying to get anything “right,” I’m trying to induce connection, which is never about rightness.

And I remember working on this copy! All I have now is like a page of our Google doc edits (throwing one in here for a little fun), but I remember thinking when we went back and forth on it, how dialed-in Eugenia was about the book. She really understood what Bianca was doing on an emotional level that I think made for such great collaboration, and a little extra of that fear of “getting it wrong.” I think it is possible to get a wrong read, but my fear is more that I approach from a part that other people won’t care about–that my weird, or my idea of what’s “meaningful” will not be where other readers find themselves knotted to a book. I can always tell when I’m closer to something kernally, earth-core-y, I can feel it in the pitch, and I try to work until I get to that feeling, but sometimes prescription wins!

CMM: You mention using excerpts in your book description (which I actually don’t think is the norm, and I love about yours!)–do the excerpts flow naturally into what you end up writing about the book, or have you pulled quotes beforehand that you think are must-haves to appear in the book description?

HJM: A little bit of both, usually! Supportive quotes will occur to me as I figure out the shape of the book description, and what exactly we’re trying to demonstrate about that book with such limited context. Other times, I’ll start with a quote that I’ve already chosen just to give myself a jumping off point, something to riff on until I arrive at the core message where the book description REALLY begins. So much of my process has to do with accommodating “waste;” we’ve been talking so much about perfectionism, and I know I won’t write anything if I have to live up to the standard of writing something insightful, economic, and grounding on the first try. Often, I find myself writing just to get the juices flowing, and when I have a first official draft I’ll realize that how I initially began was actually just a preamble until I found my way. I like to think about it as a rocket booster: necessary for lift-off, useful for the digestion and progression of ideas, but ultimately dead weight that will slow you down or divert readers from the destination if you don’t eject them.

All of which is to say — sometimes I use a quote because I think it’s brilliant, and I’ll later see that I’ve let my love for it overpower my assessment of functionality. Since we’re doing a case study of Bianca (sorry, Eugenia! and thank you!), I can show you what I mean. The first draft of the book description that I completed began with a quote from the book’s first poem. It’s a captivating, gorgeous piece, so compelling that I wanted readers to get a sample of it immediately. The initial introduction went like this: “What I miss most about Hell,” Eugenia Leigh opens Bianca, “is prayer.” In absolute submission to the incomprehensibility of cruelty, she drives her car only so she can stop it; at “the crag of [her] life / — the parking of a pancake house,” she drinks vodka from a water bottle and screams at God, and for Him, “demanding answers / from the maker of figs: // why the sycamore fruit / sweetens only when bruised, // the way a fist will / ripen a child.” This staggering mystery propels Leigh’s poems toward her own mercy. In her second collection, Leigh grapples with the childhood abuse that reiterates past harm in the present…

I’ll never forget this: once, my favorite English teacher in high school circled a paragraph in an essay I’d turned in and commented, “I can feel you getting carried away with the pleasure of wordplay here….” In college, in regard to both my poems and my critical writing, I think, Vievee Francis used to tell me, “sense over sound,” meaning clarity always trumps formal and textural concerns. What use is musicality, or pseudointellectual affectation, if the writing fails to accomplish its aims, obscures itself in aesthetically pleasing enigma at the expense of comprehension and impact? Anyway — when I returned to the Bianca description, I realized that this opening didn’t really serve to introduce potential readers to the book. It reads more as an oblique book report, because I got caught up in my own enchantment with this work. And I do believe, actually, that “What I Miss Most About Hell” is representative of what makes Bianca both transcendent and relatable; I love the productive tension between the elevated diction of the divine and the unburnished circumstances of ordinary life on earth, how the epic stakes of “atrocities // roared in ethanol rage” take place behind an IHOP. It also establishes such an aptitude for unassuming distillation, using accessible language to convey complex ideas and striking imagery, proving that intellectual depth and beauty don’t depend on ostentation or verbal complication. These poetics are a seamless collaboration between form and function, as the poem both literally and subliminally criticizes the affectation and hypocrisy of the church (not necessarily faith itself, but organized religion mediated by humans, the God they uphold). The most conventionally lyrical moments here — the edenic verdancy and song of “sycamore fruit / sweetens” — cede to horror as Leigh compares fruit maturation to the identity formation of a beaten child. That is brilliant, BRILLIANT, to demonstrate how fundamentalism enables abuse of power by revealing the logical barbarity beneath liturgical elegance. The sheer beauty and euphemistic lightness of that phrase — “the way a fist will / ripen a child” — only heightens the ugliness of the idea, the violence of control that masquerades as “tough love” or necessary suffering for the salvation of one’s soul.

So, I stand by the efficacy of this poem as the book’s opener, and there’s so much to say about how and why it pulls that off! But none of those excerpts communicate that effectively with my original framing, and abstracted from the piece like this they are gripping (the way a hook should be) but unguided (the way a book description should not be). They introduce contradiction without having the space to show how paradox and contrast are an operating strategy to convey the betrayed trust of an abused child who loves the parent who harms them, and I resort to overarching vagaries rather than establishing setting. Without setting, there is no stable foothold for the reader to consider implication, no reference point to orient analysis. How in the world could I expect the reader to digest the “staggering mystery” which “propels Leigh’s poems toward her own mercy,” or what did I even think “mercy” would suggest here, if I hadn’t told readers the basic fact that this book destabilizes the author’s understanding of her own childhood abuse as she becomes a mother herself?

TLDR: I use the quotes that compel me! And sometimes I realize I’m being extremely self-indulgent, just reveling in the richness of work I love, and I have to kill my darlings for the book description to actually make sense :)

CMM: Not killing your darlings in a book description too, Hannah! Say it isn’t so! Okay, I feel like this is a masterclass in book description already (and I wish for you that you get to be as self-indulgent as you want because you’re such a beautiful writer), so I have one more question for you. When you’re telling someone about a book vs. when you’re writing a book description–are you pulling out totally different things or do you find yourself mirroring the description in a more conversational way? I guess I’m saying (because we’ve talked so much about iterations), do you find that as you get into the publicity cycle for a book, the ways you describe it (and perhaps depending on audience) shifts?

HJM: No darling is safe!!! Everyone puts Baby in a corner!

But to your question: yes, absolutely! When I’m talking with friends in the lit world, I’m freer to gush, and I have a more intuitive sense of what would speak to them or why they might like it. When I’m recommending poetry to readers who don’t typically read much poetry, I’m leaning more on sensory richness, adept content handling, and emotional resonance — benefits I think any reader would get from experiencing a book — rather than placing the work in a genre-referential frame (I’m not saying, of course, that conversations about artistic lineage or formal innovation aren’t enriching or interesting, but that they put the horse before the cart a bit). When pitching to sales reps, my summaries mirror the book descriptions, more or less, since they’ve been approved by all parties and cover a book’s more salient characteristics, but I’ll also give an idea of how the book fits into the sales landscape, noting stylistic and thematic similarities that a rep can use to target bookbuyers based on past purchases and commercially successful titles. When I’m talking to an audience with a specific goal, I try to adapt my description to highlight a useful topic or craft point; when talking to the Helen Zell Writers’ Program cohort last year, for example, I gave a presentation called “Gathering Fallen Fruit: Arranging the Poetry Collection’s Opening Sequence” in which (to bring us full circle!!!) I used the first four pages of Bianca and the first two poems of Forest Primeval by Vievee Francis as stellar inspirations in considering our own “poetics of beginning.” I still relied on the book descriptions, of course, but in this case the featured poems served to illuminate how a book’s opening makes good on its own description while also eclipsing it, revealing the soul of a book that no expository prose can perfectly convey or contain.

And that is a gorgeous discrepancy, in my opinion! Every book description is just a roadside sign announcing that “the magic is this way,” asking you to take the next exit so you can arrive where the real wonder begins.

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Hannah Matheson received her MFA in poetry at New York University, where she served as poetry editor of Washington Square Review. Previously awarded scholarships to attend The Frost Place Conference on Poetry, Hannah has poems published in Four Way Review, The Adroit Journal, Small Orange Journal, Pigeon Pages, SOLAR, Image Journal, Honey Lit, Best New Poets, HAD, and elsewhere. Hannah currently works as associate director and senior editor at Four Way Books.