Melissa Mack

Hi Steve,

I think you and Linsdey are on chapbook tour? My facebook following of people's lives is spotty, I'm sure all of ours is. Anyway, I hope this finds you well! This morning I suddenly found myself stopping in the middle of an essay I'm writing to jot out books read in 2011. If it is still of interest to you, please feel free to use!

Moby Dick! on audio! for weeks, months?, not every night, but lots of nights i would put on headphones and listen to a chapter or more, fall asleep listening to it. it was hard to follow the plot sometimes because the musicality of the language was so absorbing. and because i would fall asleep listening to it, my way through the book was … is there a dance step for this motion of taking a step forward, and then taking a slightly smaller step back and then swinging forward another step, and then back, sort of grapevining forward? it was like that. the way that reader said harpooneer was a delicious to me. with relish.

Giorgio Agamben’s Commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Romans. I think it took all year. What does it mean to revoke all vocations? To revoke them, like, neutralize them so that they become invocations – places from which to begin to do political work rather than identities that lock us down? I go through cycles of getting up at 4 am to work. Last summer, during one of these cycles, I got up at 4 and wrote a very condensed poem through which I read a part of that book. I do not now recall what I was processing, but I include the poem here as a vestige of the reading process. Though I no longer consider it (the poem).

Was not, come to be, cause to grow, Utopia

The darling of the world has come

and gone

We are to marry her, we will

then shore up the deep us of forgotten

The dream more beautiful and more terror. Wild

zebras great and small or pulling a sleigh

down the beach. A barque,

if it is.

I also read Anne Carson’s The Economy of the Unlost, also all year. I may have started it in 2010. I remember sitting in the leather chair I found on the street reading the prologue/introduction/”note on process” might be what it’s called. the very beginning, it is two pages. I read it 18 times. I talked about it with friends. I had a conversation about it just last week. It’s about what our work is.

Those are the three that come to mind, one for each month into 2012 we are. (step forward, step back, step forward!) Thanks for asking!

Chris Martin

When I picked up Fred Moten's In the Break, on the suggestion of Thom Donovan, I was expecting it to be full of interest and challenge but holy fuck. In addition to being completely brilliant, it's also very generous. My only guess is that I'll be reading that book for the rest of my life, though I hope I can say something more thoughtful about it sometime soon.

Stephanie Gray's new book is yet-to-be-published, but I got a chance to read it last year and it totally blew me away. She works so directly. I mean, her style is so direct it can afford music and detours and repetition and all of it only gets to you quicker. Her first book Heart Stoner Bingo is great and so are the films she makes. Someone publish her next book; the world will thank you for it. Here's something new: http://www.esquemag.org/2012/02/05/stephanie-gray/

Letter Machine, which has been tearing shit up of late (cannot wait for the new Eddie Berrigan), dropped a beauty on us last year with Farid Matuk's This Isa Nice Neighborhood. If Farid quits writing tomorrow, he will have written "Tallying Song" and no one could ask much more of a poet than that. But he won't quit. He's too tall to quit. Not to mention dark and handsome. You eat a burger with the guy and it's somehow both a sensual and intellectual experience. Look out for a long, thoughtful review by Mary Austin Speaker in Painted Bride sometime soon.

Speaking of MAS, my favorite single event of last year had to be her chapbook party in Jay Grabowski's West Village backyard last fall. J (Push Press) published a selection of her long poem, The Bridge, all written while commuting back and forth to work over the Manhattan Bridge. We stapled and creased until the moment it began and then sat back in a wash of starlight and whiskey to hear Mary just kill it, all our voices creating the bridge as she went. It's a love song to NYC and its sheer peopleness, the way so much is shared and borne, the way a most uncommon living becomes common. Oh yeah, and I'm lucky enough to share a life with her.

Toward the end of the year so much outrageous gold dropped I sort of lost count. First there was Brandon Brown's Catullus book. Amazing. I've already lent it out three times. I keep talking about it. Every time I opened it up I learned something. Then there was Dana Ward's This Can't Be Life. I could have easily made my whole post about this book, but I'm too busy thinking about Dana's next book, which I have the honor of midwifing with Futurepoem. My guess is not a single Dana Ward book will be less than indispensable this decade. Sorry for the double neg. And it's been said a million times, but "Typing Wild Speech" is the achievement of a civilization. I've never bought ten copies of a chapbook before. People need them. Not to mention "Sugar Falls" and just about everything else. Finally, I was overjoyed to receive my copy of Noel Black's Uselysses, accompanied by a beautiful special edition large format chappy, Moby K. Dick. Noel is like the consummate culture worker. He transforms whatever community he's in. Often he's loud and opinionated, which draws energy to issues and events. But his writing is almost, I don't know, gentle. He wants you to sojourn with him as he thinks across world/worlds, even if the journey never leaves the bathtub. He lives the life of the mind, but lets it splinter with the joy of domesticity, introducing far-flung minds to each other in the city of word people that occurs in the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom. He introduced me to Poetry when I was young and dumb in Daly City. It looks like he's still doing it.

Paul Ebenkamp

Moby-Dick: January 1 2011: Picked this up again to pluck up my spirits while teaching Kieslowski's Decalogue to unwilling-to-be-valorously-depressed college students. "Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!" The chapter entitled "The Candles" rattles the bars of the cumbersomely designed mailroom of my soul's vaunted country every time.

War and Peace: February 4 2011: This was an easy choice. I discarded the Garnett translation after 100 pages and recommenced with the Pevear/Volokhonsky which, though I can't vouch for a syllable of Russian, seems more robust and deft in the world it has to translate. A singularly long meditation on the insignificance of greatness; on the excellent stupidity of the upper classes (particularly Petersburg's, for choice); on property, writing, the limits of imagination, the limits of force, the limits of care and solicitude; and on the slow inexorable crawl of a particular seven years of God's time. It is a chronicle of aging as much as of an age; watching Tolstoy's characters senesce was perhaps the principal pleasure I took in the book. Yes, they all get wiser.

Anna Karenina: Mid-May 2011: What else was I to do? This book is incredible. A smartly hybrid love story + feisty rake on crass sanctimonious proto-theosophic religiosity in 1870s Russian intellectual culture esp. as it relates (and is unable to relate) to changing social mores. Many excellent wheat-threshing scenes; Levin's and Anna's numerous quasi-epiphanies proceed in what I'd call sublimated counterpoint and accumulate into what's got to be one of the most ended books ever written.

2666: July 10 2011: There were certain moral agonies in Anna Karenina that perhaps led me to this. The five novellas that make up this book interact in a way that induces in the reader a new kind of brain for novel-reading; they overlap and echo each other, and they build very well (i.e. their order is purposeful), but they're also independent of each other to such a degree that finally reaching the fifth book feels like discovering a new planet, or (to put it otherwise) as if the beautiful violin solo and its heartrending key change at the end of This Heat's "Twilight Furniture" had somehow, on this listen, stretched out for a few whole beautiful days. This book has a phenomenal ending, and by "ending" I mean pages 350 through 890. The gentle reader will note that this includes pages 427-437.

(A little intermezzo scherzando: In the midst of these readings I was writing an instructor's manual for a college health textbook; this probably only took me 250 hours from June to October, but you try writing outlines about starting a family, sports injuries, healthy eating and death a couple hours a day and see how you feel.)

Ulysses: Mid-August 2011: I was so traumatized by 2666 that I turned to Ulysses for a fifth read like a PTSD patient who hears compulsively in his head odd songs from his childhood. This is a real metaphor; such a thing really happens, as I learned when my grandfather survived the big Amtrak crash in Oklahoma 12 years ago that you probably heard about. Ulysses is a novel, it can be read, it's tenacious in its methods yet deploys an abundance of different methods, each with their context and purpose. The Ormond hotel scene is beyond description (and is, worth noting, the referent of an excellent allusion somewhere in Lolita). I don't like how the chapters in Ulysses are now commonly referred to by their Odyssean correspondences as per the Linati scheme. They should be referred to using their location and time. The Ormond hotel scene takes place at 4 PM, in the course of which hour the low air of a hotel bar at the close of day bewitches all, a waiter waits, a stripling cane taps, a song that you can practically hear is sung and a watch stops - the whole composed in mostly new words that halve and double as echolocators in a waking-dreamlike pattern-notation system with lots of cues and feints and reiterations... Ulysses is mainly about surfeit and titles: a relentless, yet in important respects nonlinear, snowballing between private and public speech which describes a particular experience of modernity, subjective and objective genitive. Maybe it's basically a matter of the difference between what one calls oneself and what one tells oneself. "Love. Hate. Those are names. Rudy. Soon I am old."

Dog Years: Early November 2011: This is a vexing one. Grass has a style that you could call "flat," meaning 1) it can stay on one tonal level for the duration of a novel, or a significant portion thereof, and/or meaning 2) it's histrionic or loose or dull in some way, but even that's often parlayed into a strength upon the meaning previously stated. I think this describes the paradoxical feeling of reading this book, which has an excellent narrative structure and conceit, stages bizarre ordeals and mock-epic sequences admirably, contains a lot of side-splitting (and ultimately climactic) Heidegger-obsessed tomfoolery, and I guess Ralph Mandelheim is translating acceptably since he's done all of them and I think I've only ever seen one other translation of The Tin Drum. I'd say Dog Years is easily as strong if not stronger than that book's picaresque style; its two main focuses are the interrelations of the narrators and the many canine and other lineages whose travails and diversions and final ends are totally engrossing, but all rather vestigial still. A war book, it gives a generally creepy picture of Danzig, Dusseldorf, Cologne, Bavaria, and other pre-post-industrial Allemanic lands. Again, great narrative scheme; much is awesome in it, but...I just don't know. You should read it.

Postscript: Over the holidays I read Wallace Stevens' "Someone Puts a Pineapple Together"; Borges' Fictionnes, in the Andrew Hurley translation (I like "A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain" best), and am now on Gogol's collected stories, followed by Dead Souls, which I read at an irresponsibly young age knowing not what to think. Same thing happened to me in 2nd grade with Sphere by Michael Crichton.

Jess Heaney

1. The Re-Visionist by Miranda Mellis. I read this book on Christmas Day 2012, cover to cover, laying on a couch at my mom's house in New Jersey, so deliciously delighted to fall into a 80 page book that was so tissue-and-machines-and-feathers-beautiful; I only put down once around page 60 to refill my tea, then finish. I've been re-reading it ever since.

2. The Botanical Garden by Ellen Welcker. "I'm drawing a map, my loves…" I got this book at SPT's 2011 Open House on a rainy rainy afternoon. I bought it because of it's cute size. (it's square.) I think I re-read it every other month. It's like Bhanu Kapil's Humanimal meets Notley's Descent of Alette's quotation marks. HEART.

3. The Importance of Iceland by Eileen Myles. I bought this book at the Mills bookstore because I was bored of work that day. I needed a sugar high. The cover is a delicious Tiffany-box-blue. It's a book of essays; I read on the plane from CA to NJ and it's full of fantastic little conversation bits that colored many later bar conversations. It also serendipitously mentioned Robert Smithson who I have been thinking about and also mentioned, in the same paragraph, Paterson by William Carlos Williams. Since I grew up next to Paterson, and was going home, I read Paterson when I got there. Double!

4. Testimony by Reyznikoff. Stephanie Young lent it to me. I read sections of it every month of so. I like it. It court testimony turned into poems. There's so much place and character and, obviously, conflict, so 5-20 page bites is all I want to take in.

5. The New World Border: Prophecies, Poems, and Loqueras for the End of the Century by Guillermo Gomez-Peña. My friend Lisa Nowlain lent me this book. I read it at home, on the plane and on subways. It's essays and poems and performance texts so I enjoyed flipping it open and reading it in whatever order I chose, whatever piece caught my eye. It's a book that has popped up in many later conversations. I feel full when I read this book. Excited. But, like Poet's Theater, all the pieces are so rich and different, I felt a little bonkers when I read three in a row. Total fan-crush on the author. My office was his green room once for a performance, and he left his half-drank coffee and eyeliner and half-eaten brie and fruit plate on my desk for me to clean up in the morning, which has tempered any fantasy that he's not a real human.

P.S. Excited to read in 2012: Green is the New Red: An Insider's Account of a Social Movement Under Seige by Will Potter. My comrade Tony recommended it to me. Let's get a fresh understanding of one contingent of today's political prisoners! And Playbook for Progressives: 16 Qualities of the Successful Organizer by Eric Mann. I took this off my friend Rachel's shelf in NY and began reading it, but had to leave it in her apartment. (She's organizing domestic workers and their employers in NYC- the next wave of the labor movement!) So catchy, inspiring and also whewwww, let's get to workin!

Sunnylyn Thibodeaux

My Dearest John

      Congrats sits on the tip of my tongue but I am still grieving and I don't want to talk football anyway right now. I am still your friend no matter how it all turns out or goes down. I will say that Eli is a NOLA boy, so . . . as the one who has been in SF for over 12 years and still renews her Louisiana license, my allegiances are with my swamp-mates, always. But I still love you

      Back to books --

Book Reflections of 2011which are not in a particular order per say, but what my mommy brain could muster. Geez, there are a lot in the sense of what comes our way via the gentile man in the blue outfit pushing his cart uphill, but I was trying to think of what pulled me in or what got at me somehow or maybe it just got at me cause I couldn’t say much in the end due to “ mama, mama, mama”, or a simple loss for words. I’ve forgotten many I’m sure . . .

 

 

1.)   Laurie Duggan, Allotments (Fewer & Further Press) So as I have always done, (and do now far less frequently, but way more desperately) when a moment comes to me to be alone I grab 2 things: a book and a drink. I grabbed this book to take with me to the local hole (so that I am in reaching distance in case the holler comes) and I was all jived, like I had a drinking partner. The book was all alive in the bar scene on the page swatting fruit flies and mumbling barroom banter. I had to, just had to, write Jess Mynes (he is F&F Press) and tell him how thrilled I was with my new favorite poet’s work. Commenting with feminine pronouns all the while, I even was spastic enough to say, I have a “poetic sister” as I refer to Lew Welch as my poetic father and this seemed appropriate as Laurie was all in like Flynn on the haps of the poetics that move me to sound out anything and all tapped on the taps that flow, so . . . I decided to find out more, maybe she is on facebook, maybe we can be friends, maybe we can have a drink and gossip about corked wine and project-poetry and then I found her. Well, yeah, “Laurie” Duggan is Laurence James Duggan (born 1949), an Australian poet, editor, and translator. This changes nothing about my love for the book, I just reflect on it with rosy cheeks and a glance downward.

 

2.) Brian Richards, Enridged (UNO Press) This is a selected, 10 years worth, a narrow and hefty little package, with 160 pages. I am always happy when a poet that has given so much forth to the muse has the opportunity to collect their work and say looky-here, though I would always rather a small book in my hands. And I’m not trying to say 160 pages is large by any means. Let me back up. I first heard of Brian Richards from a professor back in college, Skip Fox. Skip had a little book out on Bloody Twin Press (Brian’s press), actually 2 books: Kabul Under Seige and Wallet and these are two of the most beautiful artifacts ever, you know like the Oyez or Perishable Press books, so much thought about how it feels in the hands, not just how it reads. And that’s what I mean by little books, the intimate art pieces that contain poetry . . .  And point being that I feel Brian Richards, whom I consider a master of the sorts, deserves better. What the hell, with the spacing on the page. Wide open spaces between short nuggets of controlled beautiful verse. It fucks with the eye, the fung shui of the poems. I like so much about this book, all that should be there : the work, the cover, its slenderness, but I want a redo on the layout.

 

 

 

3.) Dayana Fraile, Zinc Landscapes (Cy Gist Press) Another beaut that traveled via USPS, which we received just in time for the holiday break. And the dear husband was home from work so as to take care of Little Miss Lorca and I could slip into the translated (because my Spanish stinks) fierce world of Dayana Fraile. Holy Guacamole. I think she has read the Bloody Chamber often or carries a switchblade or both. Either way I am fearfully excited to see what else she has up her sleeve, but don’t wanna rumble with her on a full moon. And this translation was done by Guillermo Parra to whom I am ever grateful for making Spanish poetry readable to little ole me. It’s all incestuous, yes, as we just typed up a selection of Jose Antonio Ramos Sucre’s verse translated by Guillermo to print on Auguste Press. Ring around the rosie, pockets full of . . . yes, poetry.

 

4.) Donald Guravich, World At Large (Blue Press) I love getting notes and, even better, books from Donald because of his little drawings. This one is decorated with a little pink rabbit on a patch of grass (the year of the rabbit it is). But this particular book just happens to be illustrated by the artist as well. This is a book that has caused me great grief. For no good reason other than good ole Catholic Guilt. The book is a delight of images, concise language all woven about the days ins and outs, some intimacies of blue collar days and the roll outs of nature. We printed 2 of these even in Morning Train. Are you ever so pleased with a book you don’t know what to say without sounding forced or trite? Add that to the new addition in the household and bam! here comes the guilt. I adore Donald as a person and a poet and I have not said a thing about his book, not even a Thank You, because, well because I’m lazy or I could play the new-mom card, but in the end I think I’m lazy. So here: Donald, Thank You.

 

 

5.) I feel like I should list Tumble Bumble or Goodnight Moon here. I have these books and others memorized at this point from going over them sometimes 8-10 times a day. Poetry doesn’t get to come first with a little one running amuck. It’s hard to give the ear over to it sometimes and most of the time there isn’t the time to dive in and swim freely. I find myself reading for a particular purpose these days, cramming it in while I can. Like the new skill of speed-eating that I’ve developed.. Having this drive when reading poetry leaves a meh-feeling. I’m not in school (though sometimes I wish I were) so I don’t have to read this, why I am forcing myself. But if I don’t force myself to try to embrace something I would never read anything. All the books listed above took a little self-butt-kicking beyond the shear curiosity of the personal relationships that lead me to each.

      And so that brings me to the book that I desperately want to read again and want my friends to read so that we can discuss and I can better find my footing in the tightly woven landscape – Karen Weiser, To Light Out (Ugly Duckling Presse).  I took this one to bed with me and devoured it, oh how gorgeous it is! I felt like I was looking through the window to another place of thought that I couldn’t enter. I want in. I felt like I was reading a study, a series of cryptic passages enlightened with myth and beauty, like I was in an Indiana Jones movie and I was close to finding an ancient treasure but I was so in awe of the mystical architecture that the secret traps were about to ensnare me. I know that seems over the top, but I was immersed in the language and it seemed the draw-bridge was crumbling. Maybe I was feeling the tic-toc of my own reading window close. Maybe I was really “in” as I wanted to be, but like a drug experience, came out of it saying “what just happened?” I can’t recall having a book get at me like this – like I was drifting, mouth agape and eyes dazed, ears fixed on sounds that recognize my own head, but addicted. Addicted to what? What was this fix I was craving? I have to read and re-read and come back. I lent it out to another poet, Christina Fisher, because I wanted fresh eyes and another perspective to guide me (and I wanted that perspective to be that of another woman and as we oh-so-often do we’ve cancelled on each other about 5x now). I can’t comfortably plead mommy-brain on this one. I do believe we can fall in love with that which confounds us. So I have. Whoever said art was about understanding anyway? I think it’s more about desire and recognition. And I have surely been left with both. I do expect to revisit this topic in my book list of 2012.

 

Julien Poirier

Five things I didn’t expect to find in 2011: 

Will Skinker’s Feed My Lambs on Lew Gallery came in the mail. The last poem in the chapbook, “Coronation,” really blew me away. California poem, pace the coastal sun on prison walls and the rusted dent on a 70s station wagon. I might have the details wrong but I remember exactly how I felt when I was there. It’s an incredible poem because it brings you to a mindstate of surrender or bleak acceptance through fierce tender language that never lets up. It’s a real poem!

Looking for Paterson in the Berkeley Public Library at the end of the year I bumped into from the warring factions by Ammiel Alcalay. If you haven’t read this great book (published some years ago) I just returned it to the Main Branch today.

Leonora Carrington was someone I had never heard of until Cedar Sigo bought me a copy of The Oval Lady, stories translated by Rochelle Holt, a rare book with a strange acid-green cover that looks like 3 different artists worked on it in a dungeon. The delicately neurotic drawings are by her son, Pablo Weisz. 1975.

Owen Hill’s detective poet novel The Chandler Apartments would have been my favorite one-sitting read of the year if it hadn’t been for his recently published pamphlet Union Steward, which tells the story of an airline workers’ union firebrand none other than the author as a young man.

I read The End of the West by Michael Dickman and was surprised by how striking some of the images were. (I haven’t read the poet’s second book, which I believe was published last year.) He brags too much about what a soulful hard-ass he is, growing up on the tough side of Portland and all, which makes it all the more fun to read. Here’s the one book of the year that I wanted to hate (and checked out for that reason) but ended up enjoying disliking.

---Julien Poirier

Erica Lewis

John –

Below are a few of my 2011 reads. Hope 2012 has been swell for you so far.

 - erica

Just Kids, Patti Smith – read mostly in bed; it’s such an intimate book that it just didn’t feel right to read it anywhere else. I’m not a Patti Smith fan, but I’ve been interested in Robert Mapplethorpe for a number of years because I’m from Cincinnati and remember well the controversy surrounding the exhibition of his works, and subsequent obscenity trial, in that city when I was a teenager. It was all over the local news and people were really focusing on how indecent Mapplethorpe’s work was. I remember thinking even at that age that I had to get out there; I couldn’t stay in a place that was so small and small-minded, a place where they were actually trying to ban “art” and decide what the public could and could not choose of their own free will to see. Anyway, this is a gorgeous book about loyalty and art. And it’s not really about what I thought it was going to be about, which was such a great surprise. This book actually helped me a great deal in informing a project about poetry and music that I began about the same time I started reading it. Not necessarily because of the subject matter, but because of the way that Smith wrote about art and creativity and passion and the desire to really be an artist, and what all those things really mean. 

an aside – Smith is obsessed with Genet in Just Kids – there was nary a Genet in my library; after reading this, I felt like I needed to be more familiar with his work, so I went out and got his first four novels. Also went back and looked at old footage and articles of the Cincinnati trial – interesting supplemental reading, kind of trippy to “remember when.” Also good post novel supplements - the film Black White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe as well as Smith’s Charlie Rose interview about the book.

Life, Keith Richards – read mostly in bed, Itunes playing, headphones on; it’s actually quite a sprawling book, detailing Richards’ childhood through the almost present, but full of intimate details, and once you get into it (it took me a good 100 of 500 plus pages) you really “hear” Richards’ voice. The writing isn’t great, but you really get the sense that it’s not just some celebrity book penned by a ghost writer. Quite an interesting read. I was mostly interested in the history associated with events that happened in the book. I wound up Googling a lot of musicians that I hadn’t heard of, looking up lots of events that I hadn’t known about. I love the 60s and 70s, so it was a great cultural history lesson. Surprising amount of technical details re: music and instrumentation, too – I never thought of Richards as a true technician when it came to composing and song writing. Made me rethink music and celebrity in a way. Props to Keith Richards for being so honest and vulgar and open and raw. That’s one thing the Richards and Smith books had in common. Rawness. And probably why they made so much sense together when read back to back.

One Sleeps the Other Doesn’t, Jacqueline Waters – read in bed, at the kitchen table, in the living room – this book felt like it was going somewhere, so it felt okay to let it move about with me from room to room. Personal traveling poems. I love Jacqueline’s writing. I feel honored that she read at the Canessa series while I was curating. Her work is searing and big but feels contained, a poetry jewel box of sorts. So witty. So many lines from this I wish I’d written. I pre-ordered this from UDP as soon as I received their email about new releases. I left this book feeling as if I had gained something, or rather something about this book just made me feel better. Her first book, A Minute Without Danger, made me feel the same way. Rare to find that. Sharpness and catharsis.

That This, Susan Howe – read mostly in bed. Such a quiet book. It reminded me of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. Joan Didion redux. I loved that book, my introduction to Didion’s work, and there are so many similarities with That This, as if the two were in polite ghost conversation. I’ve been a fan of Susan Howe for years, since being introduced to her work in a class at Mills (I think it was Stephen Ratcliffe’s Listening to Reading). I’ve read everything she’s released since that time. Her writing has informed my work in many ways. It haunts me. Sounds. Whispers. Textures. Literal ghosts.

Aerodrome Orion & Starry Messenger, Susan Gevirtz -  read in bed and in transit (which I suppose is appropriate because of the way the text itself moves across the page through space, time); bought at the Kelsey Street launch, signed by Susan. I always wish that I could have taken a class with Susan when I was at Mills, but she didn’t start teaching there until the year after I graduated. She definitely continues to inspire me though in terms of where I want to go with my work and the kind of writer I want to be. Reminded me of : a fairytale from far far away; how to simultaneously be expansive and intimate, accessible but not too accessible. An intricate flight pattern that includes both ice cream and Barbara Guest. Sparse and vocal and intricate. Visuals hover from above. The language ready for take off.

Bonus read: With + Stand, Issue 5,  Dan Thomas Glass’ DIY magazine – this is more than a shout out. Dan curates some really interesting work from a wide and varied group of contemporary writers and puts it all together in a superb spray painted, hand assembled volume. A pure labor of love. He calls it a game of tag, but it’s really a wonderful undertaking and show of support for poets and poetry.