Friday Links: DeMar DeRozan Edition

“Sometimes I get so sad / I think about eating a quesadilla,” – Noor Hindi, “Broken Light Bulb Flickering Away

Wednesday wasn’t DeMar DeRozan’s final game as a Chicago Bull, and tonight doesn’t have to be, either. Big ups to a Mediocre Chicago Bulls Team Full Of Guys I Like as they take on the Weren’t You Guys Fun Two Years Ago? Miami Heat in the play-in tournament tonight. DeMar DeRozan is the coolest Bull since Joakim Noah. Today’s Friday Links is dedicated to The Villain Joel, the biggest DeMar DeRozan fan I know.

What I’ve Been Reading This Week

I am still rolling through my self-imposed 30/30 challenge for National Poetry Month! This week’s column was supposed to be a reflection on how reading so much weird art so frequently and rapidly has affected my thinking about art and creative process, but, y’know. Taxes. Suffice to say I am the good kind of overwhelmed, and really enjoying everything I’m reading.

• The Wine-Dark Sea by Mathias Svalina: did you know the ancient Greeks didn’t have a word for blue? Or whatever the technical linguistic way to say it is? What would we be without art. Miserable, that’s a certainty. Even at one point, society could come up with Helen of Troy and Patroclus and Odysseus and the Cyclops but not a word for what the water was.

• Selenography by Joshua Marie Wilkinson: practically a sacred text to me, reading this book is sipping a choice potion in a warm room after a haunted day. Beautifully put together by Sidebrow.

• Swamp Isthmus by Joshua Marie Wilkinson: this pentalogy of poetry collections deepens. Something akin to characters begin watch you suspiciously as you walk past their lawns at sunset. This book is great to read out loud.

• Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara: the book that features the poem that made me love poetry. Lotta bangers in here, but I’ve only read it cover-to-cover once or twice. Should read more dead poets’ single collections.

• frank: sonnets by Diane Seuss: is the only interesting way to write memoir with minutiae? Talk about a book that absolutely breezes but constantly demands you stop and read closer. This book felt profoundly American in a way people who usually proclaim things as “American” probably wouldn’t think about.

• Dear God, Dear Bones, Dear Yellow by Noor Hindi: for as much as Bob and I talk about “Fuck Your Lecture On Craft, My People Are Dying,” on The Line Break, this is my first time reading this book cover-to-cover and goddamn, it did not disappoint. I’m overwhelmed by the range in this book: the vulnerability and rage, the tenderness and righteous anger, the magic interwoven into the smallest sentences. It all exists seamlessly together on the page. It’s wonderful writing. I had forgotten this book was Haymarket and man, what an offering from them.

• Build Yourself A Boat by Camonghne Felix: layers compound on this collection, plank by plank building a portrait that again left me feeling like this book was profoundly American in a way people usually proclaim things as “American” probably wouldn’t think about. The jaw-dropping conclusion to this book. The way it makes you reconsider the rest of the book, the way it feels horrifying and casual at the same time. “Tonya Harding’s Fur Coats” took my breath away.

LINKS!

• DeMar DeRozan’s daughter, Diar, held the Toronto Raptors to a shitty free throw percentage on Wednesday night, making Diar the de facto Best Rim Protector on the team.

  

• No Dunks is already calling Diar the Play-In MVP.