What I\u2019ve Been Reading This Week:<\/strong><\/p> Oh it\u2019s 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 <\/em>by Melissa Lozada-Oliva and The House On Mango Street<\/em> by Sandra Cisneros. <\/p> 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 \u201cspare\u201d but these books are not, they are singeing with details and awash in galaxies that occur on the space of the page where there\u2019s 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\u2019re short and they have short chapters but this isn\u2019t <\/a>Goosebumps<\/a><\/em>, this is poetry. You read a one-page chapter and sit with it for five minutes. As I already said, it\u2019s writing I admire and aspire to. <\/p> LINKS!<\/strong><\/p> My dear friend Hannah Cohen, interviewed in <\/a>Southern Review of Books<\/a><\/em>. The money quote is \u201c\u2026poetry is more than just a practice, but an ongoing evolution of the relationship between the self and the written word.\u201d 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. <\/p><\/li> Kelly Link got a real-ass profile in <\/a>Vulture<\/a><\/em>, and man, y\u2019all. 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<\/a> or asked Billy \u201cThe Worst Living Poet\u201d Collins why no one reads poetry<\/a>. 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\u2019m most jealous of Kelly Link having a writer\u2019s 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<\/em> shirt decal from a sweepstakes). Also, shoutout Northhampton! My granddad was from there. Beautiful town.<\/p><\/li> The excellent K.C. Mead-Brewer (whose Peacock Mantis Shrimp newsletter<\/a> is a must-subscribe, imagine a horror hostess at the bottom of the ocean) had this wonderful flash story come out on Flash Frog, \u201cPatagium.<\/a>\u201d The best flash fiction, like poetry, resists paraphrase, so I\u2019ll say no more except read this, right now! Go! Come back after, but go!<\/a><\/p><\/li> This is \u201ccool\u201d in a very different sense of the first three links. It\u2019s cool in the way \u201cmaking the right enemies\u201d is cool, but very uncool<\/em> in the way that \u201cbeing spied on by the FBI\u201d is uncool. Unicorn Riot<\/em> reports that Pilsen Community Books is being spied on by the FBI<\/a> under suspicion of being violent leftist extremists. \u201cViolent leftist extremists\u201d here seems to mean \u201ca worker-owned bookstore that sometimes houses community events.\u201d Protect Pilsen Community Books, everyone! Maybe save some of that energy for actual violent extremists (hint: they\u2019re usually not left<\/em> wing), the FBI! <\/p><\/li>![](\"https:\/\/substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com\/public\/images\/81521ba9-2ce5-42da-934c-4614d29f78f4_4032x3024.jpeg\"\/)
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