Friday Links: Staying Home During Lollapalooza To Read Edition

“Somewhere I am owed a dearer god. / To pluck out his fire. / I need a psalm” – Hannah Cohen, “Year of the Scapegoat”

Happy Friday! It’s Lollapalooza Weekend, you sure as hell aren’t seeing my ass anywhere south of Little Vietnam.

What I’ve Been Reading This Week:

Oooooh baby I’ve been waiting for these books! Both in the sense that they were written by a dear friend and I’ve overdue on reading them, and in the sense that I accidentally had them shipped to my old address and it took a minute to get my hands on them. But bahgawd, poetry is worth the wait, especially these two chaps. I’m talking, of course, about Bad Anatomy and Year Of The Scapegoat by Hannah Cohen.

Bad Anatomy: man, first off, Hannah’s books definitely go in the “makes me want to go write” category. Every three pages or so I would be tempted to get out my notebook. These poems are really good at self-deprecation that isn’t grating, either thanks to their compelling syntax (verb some nouns, poets!) or to brevity. Idk, I’m obsessed with crispness lately—shoutout Maya Williams—and Hannah’s poems, especially here, really zing. Speaking of The Line Break, here’s our interview with Hannah from last year!

Year of the Scapegoat: maybe it’s the religious stuff, but this book really got at me. Like Hannah, I’ve also had to put up with living around Bible Belt freaks—unlike Hannah, I am not Jewish—and I can feel the special kind of resigned anger you get when you know most of your neighbors would be hostile to you if they could in this book. But anybody can write 20 pages disillusioned with religion, you really want to pick this book up for lines line “I have been grinding my teeth in my sleep. I buried my grandfather…I went to the dentist for the first time since my dad left. I am having feelings again…Your gums are so soft.” Parenthetical deliberately left in so you will go buy this book. See what you’re missing.

LINKS!

• Up top, some exciting news: I am guest-editing a whole issue of Cotton Xenomorph! The theme is “Cryptids and Climate Change,” and you can see the submission call here. Looking for poems and stories—I even upped the word count max to 2,500 for all you perverts out there—and we’re capping submissions at 100, so get them in! If you’ve read CX, you know what we like; if you read this silly Friday Links column, you know what I like.

• Speaking of Creature Features! Oh, y’all are in for a treat with this one. Here’s Tananarive Due—at a cabin in the woods—reading from her story “Incident at Bear Creek Lodge.”