“A group of monsters / should be called // a possibility” – Chloe N. Clark, “If I were a monster”
This week and next week are devoted to friends! Next week’s poetry week, and I’ll be reading a few books I’ve been meaning to get around to. This week, I’m reflecting on how lucky I am to be good friends with someone who is genuinely one of my favorite writers. All I’ve wanted since high school was to spend my time around artists, and by that metric, I’ve got a pretty good life. Let’s get into it. But first, The Emmys!
What I’ve Been Reading This Week:
Two books I knew I liked. One book of short stories that is doing similar things to a manuscript I’m currently working on. One book of poetry that’s just fun as hell. Both books play with genre, in multiple ways. The stories play around with horror and sci-fi, play around with length, and play around with language. The poems are tender lyrics written around one of the more violent action movie heroes we have. Don’t you love containing multitudes? Multi-modal-titudes? I’m talking, of course, about Collective Gravities and Every Song A Vengeance by Chloe N. Clark.
Collective Grativites by Chloe N. Clark: my biggest memory of this book is reading it in 2020, when it came out. My kid would’ve been not quite two, so the majority of my days were spent sitting on the couch, watching him sprint around, trying to make sure he didn’t crash into anything in ways that would be permanent crashes. It was an exhausting time, not quite as exhausting as Year Zero, but close. I didn’t have much of a brain then, and was grateful to read stories that were both 1) really good, fun, and well-written and 2) read easily, as though writing this well was attainable for me, too, if only my kid could get to school age. I especially appreciated the mix of lengths—there’s plenty of flash, some longer stories, and stories in between. Normally, I advocate for reading short stories/poems in the order of the Table of Contents, but during this time of my life? I was glad to have some short ones I could knock out if the kid was distracted, then longer ones to read when he went down for a nap.
Why am I going so long on my first time reading this book? Well, for one, those memories came flooding back. I remember reading this book almost as clearly as I remember making Weight Of An Anchor. Reading it this time, I felt this same things, appreciating the book’s varying currents. Revisiting these characters evoked warmer feelings then what’s usual for the second time around a book, a virtue I attribute to Chloe’s ability to flesh out characters with just a few descriptions, or a food choice. If you must read just one of Chloe’s books of short stories, I’d give the slight edge to Patterns Of Orbit. Then again, she has a new book, Every Galaxy A Circle, out soon from Jackleg Press. So you might as well read all three.
Every Song A Vengeance by Chloe N. Clark: an absolute all-timer in one of my favorite categories: the hell-yeah-enjoy-the-ride-read-in-one-sitting poetry book. These are sometimes called chapbooks, but are a little longer than what I personally think of as a chapbook (40-59 pages, this one clocks in at 48). These poems are, as I said above, tender, but Chloe doesn’t exactly shy away from the nastiness of living and dying. There’s playfulness without being cloying and sadness without being whiny. Really, get on an exercise bike and read this book in one sitting. Or smoke a huge joint and read it in one sitting. Whatever your means, just read this one.
LINKS!
Something to listen to while you browse? I’M THINKING OF THIS SONG LATELY, FOR SOME REASON.
- Must-read from Ta-Nehisi Coates in Vanity Fair: Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Clause.
- Trump’s too scared to send the National Guard to Chicago, but we’re still dealing with ICE. The Legal Klan has taken to shittier and shittier tactics, like terrorizing poorer suburbs, where it’s harder for mass protests to crop up. To cover all this, newsrooms across Chicago are collaborating to gather video. The collaborative includes Block Club Chicago, Injustice Watch, the Invisible Institute, Lumpen Radio, the Investigative Project on Race and Equity, Cicero Independiente, South Side Weekly, Borderless Magazine, the Chicago Reader and The TRiiBE. Here’s Corli Jay at The Triibe with How to share your videos of ICE and other federal agents with The Triibe, and hell, why not. Read Trump says Chicago is an undesirable ‘hellhole,’ but tourists and transplants keep coming and What tactics are being used to fight back against increased ICE activity in the Chicagoland area, too.
- In Little Village—aka the Mexican capital of the Midwest—people are blowing literal whistles to warn their neighbors about ICE, Alex V. Hernandez at Block Club reports
- Do not forget, in all of this, that ICE murdered a single father in cold blood, in board daylight, in the middle of the street, after school drop-off. His name was Silverio Villegas González, and he should still be alive. Steve Held, Raven Geary, Dave Byrnes, and Shawn Mulcahy have the story at Unraveled (and Reader). Unraveled has been doing some of the best on-the-ground work out there. If you were ever worried about the U.S. sliding into full fascism, this past week should show you what it’s like. Between the witch hunts to ruin the lives of anyone who quotes Charlie Kirk’s own words instead of deifying him and ICE doing this? Fascism is here, full force. It’s been here a while, honestly.
- Now back to the people who wanted this. Samer Kalaf in Defector with This Is Who Charlie Kirk Was. A pull quote, because Defector is subscription-based (but worth it!): “It’s important to be specific about what Kirk argued for when he was holding a microphone. He hated Muslims. He hated trans people. He referred to the Civil Rights Act as a ‘huge mistake.’ He supported Israel and its role in the Gaza genocide. When asked in a debate if he would support an abortion for his 10-year-old daughter if she had become pregnant due to rape, he said he would make her carry the baby to term. He saw minorities as inferior, immigration as poisonous to the United States, and gun violence as a necessary price of preserving a perverted vision of freedom. ‘I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights,’ Kirk said at an event in 2023. ‘That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe.’ Many of the remembrances of Kirk gloss over these details.“
What’re you still doing here? Don’t you know that Micah and Brendan have a show?
If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. As Chloe teaches us in “John Wick Meets Ted ‘Theodore’ Logan:” “There are two sides to every coin / even the ones you cash in / for what you’re owed // If one side is vengeance / than the other side must be / to forgive, to be / excellent to one another.” Because fascism is a loser ideology that cannot sustain itself, there will be a day when we’re past the worst of this, when we must learn to be excellent to each other. That cannot happen without serious consequences for the horrors that the USian right has wrought. But it is, still, a worthwhile goal—to one day be excellent to each other.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris