LouLife

Jane Gentry Vance is Kentucky’s poet laureate (2007-09) and a professor of English at the University of Kentucky. Her most recent book is Portrait of the Artist as a White Pig (LSU Press, 2006). She is also author of the collection of poems A Garden in Kentucky and the chapbook A Year in Kentucky: A Garland of Poems. As poet laureate, Vance hopes to “honor and celebrate the place of writing in general, and of poetry in particular, in the rich culture of Kentucky.”

BOOKS THAT HAVE GUIDED YOUR PERSONAL OUTLOOK OR BELIEF SYSTEM
Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation and Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents
“As a seeker of the emptiness, the nothingness that God fills, Merton sees faith as the effort to integrate this mystery into our everyday lives. In this last essay, Freud — prophet and epic poet — describes how human culture is shaped by my, and your, capacity for aggression and destructiveness.”

BOOK YOU'RE READING NOW
The Maytrees by Annie Dillard
“This novel doesn’t trivialize human nature, but sees women and men as capable of the big, old virtues: love, selfless action, attention to the world and its possibilities of beauty.”

BOOK YOU PLAN TO READ NEXT
Where We Stand: Class Matters by bell hooks
“I want to understand better the function of social class in American life. It’s the elephant in the room, because we don’t like to think of our society as being shaped by class.”

BOOK YOU'D RECOMMEND TO A FRIEND TO TAKE ON VACATION
The Little Fri/files/storyimages/by Donna Tartt
“You can’t put it down, even to take a dip in the waves. She’s a consummate storyteller, whose characters are people that you know, especially if you grew up in the South.”

FAVORITE BOOK OR AUTHORS AT AGE 21
Sylvia Plath and W.B. Yeats 
“I was so moved then, and still am, by Yeats’ vision of what it means to be human, of the passionate currents that make a self — and by how he expressed this in poems at once resonant and bardic, and very completely controlled. In Sylvia Plath’s poems, though, I began to hear a voice speaking from a place that I, as a woman, might speak from, too.”

GREAT BOOK YOU'VE NEVER READ
Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace
“I’m saving this for my really old age!”