The blog\u2019s birthday coming right after Halloween is such a fitting time to do some reflection. Spooky season\u2019s over, Noirvember (a new thing I\u2019m doing this year but pretending has been a long tradition) is starting, and in between, yr man the Shipwrecked Sailor celebrates some friends and favorites. <\/p>
What I\u2019ve Been Reading This Week<\/strong><\/p> You know, in the first year, I came up with various unofficial gimmicks for this blog. The What I\u2019ve Been Reading This Week\/Links delineation didn\u2019t exist at first. Neither did the faux-suspense I do in the first paragraph, keeping y\u2019all right on the edge of your seats until revealing what you already knew from the thumbnail. It\u2019s silly, but one thing I\u2019ve learned about myself from doing this blog<\/em> is that I am a fundamentally silly person. So this week, we are reflecting on inspiration, and we are celebrating our friends (their presses, anyway, I am not lucky enough to personally know any of the authors this week). This week, I read The Story of A Shipwrecked Sailor <\/em>by Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez and the three inaugural chapbooks from my beloved Bob\u2019s Garden Party Collective: The Failure of Photography <\/em>by Leah Mueller, have you ever dreamed of flamingos? <\/em>by M\u00f3nica Teresa Ortiz, and Meditations from My Childhood Bedroom<\/em> by Christa Vander Wyst. <\/p> Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor <\/strong><\/em>by Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez: <\/strong>already talked about this Wednesday<\/a>, so I\u2019ll keep it short here. This is admittedly a book for Gabo Sickos (copyright), I\u2019m not going to be like \u201cyou have to read this.\u201d It does have, however, adventure on the high seas, shark fights, and a good perspective to keep when you\u2019re having a shitty day at work. I will say here I unequivocally admire Luis Alejandro Velasco and his need to come clean with his story. Especially since there was so little in it for him. It takes bravery to stand up to authoritarians, it takes real courage to stand up to authoritarians when continuing to live a lie means you\u2019re rich. <\/p> a quick note on Garden Party Collective<\/strong><\/em>: <\/strong>I don\u2019t remember when I first pitched The Line Break<\/em> to Bob, but I do remember I was looking for an excuse to talk about poems. Us committing to that podcast led me to meet the Cotton Xenomorph<\/em> folks, led me to meet Christopher and Laura and Lyd and Stephen over at Garden Party Collective, led me to feel like I\u2019d have at least a few readers if I started this blog. Doing things is almost always better than not doing things. The fact that they\u2019re doing this press\u2014and with such an emphasis on community!\u2014is inspiring and exciting. So, it feels appropriate to celebrate my friends while celebrating the blog birthday. <\/p> The Failure of Photography<\/strong><\/em> by Leah Mueller: <\/strong>what better place for lonesome melancholy than desert west of North America, where every rock is red and every coffee cup yellow? Where drunk cowboys can sense your impending death and give you hugs? Leah Mueller\u2019s chapbook, dedicated to her late husband, are as melancholy and elegiac as you\u2019d expect this sort of collection to be, but with a determination to \u201cexplain\u2026why I don\u2019t want to always live alone. Why I still love sex and food and music. Why entire days go by without me shedding a tear.\u201d<\/p> have you ever dreamed of flamingos? <\/strong><\/em>by M\u00f3nica Teresa Ortiz: <\/strong>I\u2019ve been reading lots of poems about climate change lately thanks to the \u201cCrpytids and Climate Change\u201d issue I\u2019m guest-editing for CX<\/a><\/em>, and what I found very refreshing about M\u00f3nica Teresa Ortiz\u2019s chapbook is how concerned with the whole of nature\u2019s history. The fact that the land on this continent had names before all the 711s, the fact that flamingos can\u2019t be found in the Gulf of Mexico unless they escaped from the zoo before they could have their wings clipped, the fact that there was a time before Covid-19 \u201cbecame a glitch in the fabric of our lives\u201d\u2014a lot that has been lost is inventoried here. This chapbook also reminded me of how the 1919 flu pandemic was basically forgotten<\/a>, and books like this one, with its frank and honest discussion of the pandemic sucking, feel more and more urgent. <\/p> Meditations from My Childhood Bedroom<\/strong><\/em> by Christa Vander Wyst: <\/strong>I\u2019m going to be honest, childhood poems have a huge bar to clear for me. Call it trauma from editing the undergrad lit mag, idk. But the poems here take enough twists and turns, go enough surprising places, that I found myself enjoying this chapbook. <\/p> LINKS!<\/strong><\/p> Something to listen to? Why not watch my favorite band, Chon, play on a rooftop? <\/p>![\"books:](\"https:\/\/substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com\/public\/images\/f992b126-ebd9-439a-bf2a-9e7b909d14d6_4032x3024.jpeg\")
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