Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 by Frank Bidart
Published 2017 · 197,450 words · about 20 hours at an average pace
How hard is Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 to read?
Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 scores 68 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 58 out of 100
- Plain speech typographically wrenched — capitals, italics, broken lines.
- Sentence structure: 68 out of 100
- Syntax deliberately fractured across the page.
- Abstraction: 72 out of 100
- Guilt, appetite and form treated abstractly.
- Information density: 65 out of 100
- Compressed; the monologues carry whole lives.
- Narrative indirection: 72 out of 100
- Dramatic monologues spoken by murderers, anorexics and the dead.
- Symbolic density: 68 out of 100
- The body is the sustained figure throughout.
- Ironic distance: 62 out of 100
- Constant distance between the speakers' self-accounts and their acts.
- Resolution withholding: 72 out of 100
- The monologues end without judgement.
- Structural complexity: 68 out of 100
- A collected poems spanning fifty years and several formal projects.
How Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 is regarded
Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 holds a literary regard score of 67 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.