“Any time somebody asks me this I can only shit out an answer, / leave it there, and walk away, ashamed. / I tell her I am a poet.” – Melissa Lozada-Oliva, “I Take Selena to a Poetry Reading”
We made it to Friday! My kid’s out of school today, which means doing something fun in this very fun city. Museums abound. Maybe pics next week. Onto the column!
What I’ve Been Reading This Week:
Oh it’s been a great week. Great week! Two re-reads, two novels that operate in the short form to build a larger picture, two novels that feel intensely personal yet exist with a full sense of community. All stuff that really gets me going, writing I absolutely aspire to. Man, it was a good week reading Dreaming Of You by Melissa Lozada-Oliva and The House On Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros.
Trying to highlight a theme for the one paragraph of lit crit I allot myself here, there is so much to love about the form of these books. Because a novel in verse and a novel in vignettes can lazily be described as “spare” but these books are not, they are singeing with details and awash in galaxies that occur on the space of the page where there’s no ink. Each chapter gives you an immaculately distilled snapshot in 1-3 pages that would take a maximalist 13 pages to fully flesh out. You think you can breeze through these books because they’re short and they have short chapters but this isn’t Goosebumps, this is poetry. You read a one-page chapter and sit with it for five minutes. As I already said, it’s writing I admire and aspire to.
LINKS!
My dear friend Hannah Cohen, interviewed in Southern Review of Books. The money quote is “…poetry is more than just a practice, but an ongoing evolution of the relationship between the self and the written word.” This neatly describes why I was so good at writing deals for burger joints at Groupon, but not good at poetry when I worked in a parking office.
Kelly Link got a real-ass profile in Vulture, and man, y’all. I did not know legacy media did profiles of COOL AND GOOD writers. I thought they just talked to Jonathan Franzen about kidnapping Iraqi orphans or asked Billy “The Worst Living Poet” Collins why no one reads poetry. My favorite detail is Kelly Link wearing a boa constrictor to school like a belt and rescuing a cold iguana that fell out of a tree. The detail I’m most jealous of Kelly Link having a writer’s studio with her best friends. The detail that impressed upon to me how much the world has changed is Kelly Link winning a trip around a world in a sweepstakes (I have only ever won an iron-on Animorphs shirt decal from a sweepstakes). Also, shoutout Northhampton! My granddad was from there. Beautiful town.
The excellent K.C. Mead-Brewer (whose Peacock Mantis Shrimp newsletter is a must-subscribe, imagine a horror hostess at the bottom of the ocean) had this wonderful flash story come out on Flash Frog, “Patagium.” The best flash fiction, like poetry, resists paraphrase, so I’ll say no more except read this, right now! Go! Come back after, but go!
This is “cool” in a very different sense of the first three links. It’s cool in the way “making the right enemies” is cool, but very uncool in the way that “being spied on by the FBI” is uncool. Unicorn Riot reports that Pilsen Community Books is being spied on by the FBI under suspicion of being violent leftist extremists. “Violent leftist extremists” here seems to mean “a worker-owned bookstore that sometimes houses community events.” Protect Pilsen Community Books, everyone! Maybe save some of that energy for actual violent extremists (hint: they’re usually not left wing), the FBI!
Nic Anstett (who you may remember from last week’s newsletter) brought up an important point about AWP24. In short, two bills in the Missouri state house would effectively criminalize trans presence at AWP. A writer’s conference without trans writers and readers is not a writer’s conference. There is already a lot of conversation around how best to support trans folks at AWP, and I’m glad these conversations are happening early. No matter what happens, in state houses or with AWP, the most important thing to me is: support and protect trans folks at all costs. Again: the literary community does not exist without trans folks.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris