Blog

Nonfiction
In the Dream House – Carmen Maria Machado
Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life – Amber Scorah
Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations – Mira Jacob
The Book of Delights – Ross Gay
The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work – Shawn Achor

Fiction
The Starless Sea – Erin Morgenstern
A Song for a New Day – Sarah Pinsker
On the Come Up – Angie Thomas
The Nickel Boys – Colson Whitehead
Spinning Silver – Naomi Novik
Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea – Sarah Pinsker
Washington Black – Esi Edugyan
How Long ’til Black Future Month? – N.K. Jemisin

Poetry
Monument: Poems New and Selected – Natasha Trethewey

I also decided to start something new this year, by tallying my book stats to delve a bit more into my reading habits. Here’s what I found:

Books read: 35

*by women: 25 (71%)
*by BIWOC: 12 (34%)
*by men: 10 (29%)
*by BIMOC: 3 (9%)
*by BIPOC: 15 (43%)

Queer Literature: 9 (26%)
Latinx Literature: 2 (6%)
Native/Indigenous Literature: 1 (3%)
Asian/Pacific Islander Literature: 2 (6%)
Black Literature: 10 (29%)

Fiction: 17 (49%)
Nonfiction: 11 (31%)
Poetry: 6 (17%)
Genre is a Blurry Thing: 1 (3%)

I read a lot fewer books in 2019 than usual. (My average is typically somewhere between 50 and 80.) What happened? Life.

Also, I read way less poetry than usual. A lot of my 2019 books were on my e-reader (a new thing for me), which often doesn’t lend itself well to poetry.

Instead, I read more nonfiction. Some of my favorite books of 2019 were memoirs and essay collections. 

I read quite a bit of queer lit and black lit this year! Hooray! But where were my genderqueer writers this year? Yeesh.

2020 reading goals
*More poetry! 
*More books in print. I miss turning pages. 
*More books by BIPOC, especially Latinx, Native, and Asian authors. 
*More books by non-binary and genderqueer writers. 
(Thanks to Electric Lit, I’ve got some ideas for books that combine these last 2 goals.)

What did your 2019 reading look like? What are your reading goals for 2020?

  • You’re Setting Up Your Razor Wire Shrine, July 27, 2019: I was looking for something suspenseful, a beach read for summer, and one of the local libraries recommended this. I had a glorious time dozing in the sand and reading this book on and off while snuggled up in my hoodie–this is still, after all, the Pacific Northwest, and the beaches here are cold!

Under the Midnight SunUnder the Midnight Sun by Keigo Higashino

Under the Midnight Sun is less of a whodunnit–that part is pretty clear right from the start–than a whydonnit or a howdunnit. Those questions were what made this book a page-turner, and they kept me guessing at the answers right up until the last 50 pages or so. While the motivations of the characters turned out to be fairly believable even while they came as a surprise, the plausibility of their ability to pull off heinous and technically complicated crimes–and to manipulate everyone around them in order to avoid capture–was questionable.

There’s a byzantine cast of characters, which made untangling the mystery all that much more complex for me because I had a hard time keeping track of everyone. Admittedly, I think this is due just as much to my minimal familiarity with Japanese names as it is to the raft of new characters introduced throughout the book.

In fact, more than the plot or the psychology of the perpetrators or the plausibility of the crimes, what I discovered in the process of reading this novel is how much of a difference cultural familiarity–or ignorance–can make in my reading experience, as well as how flat-out limited my knowledge of Japanese culture is. For instance, because the book spans decades, Higashino signals the passage of time throughout the book by referencing different elements of Japanese culture–pop songs, baseball teams, TV shows, sumo wrestlers–that were having their heyday at the moment a chapter takes place. I was able to decipher the timing from other cues, but it took me a while to understand that this was even an intentionally crafted element of Higashino’s storytelling because I was so oblivious to what these references signaled.

I’m certain I missed out on other nuances due to my cultural illiteracy, though I did my best to stay curious and research what I could about aspects I knew I didn’t understand. Still, sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know. If I say I “liked” this book, rather than “loved” it, I’d chalk that up to my failure to bring enough to the table as a reader to see the full picture that Higashino paints.

View all my reviews

  • We Drove the Car to the Top of the Parking Ramp, July 3, 2019: On this eve of a holiday that makes me oddly uncomfortable–and that I will escape by fleeing into the woods for a couple of days to avoid fireworks and national anthems and celebrations of a country that doesn’t feel all that free, though some of us are still doing our best to be brave–here’s a review of a book that gets right down to what it means to be an American, at least for some of us:

    Good Talk: A Memoir in ConversationsGood Talk: A Memoir in Conversations by Mira Jacob

    I crawled into bed last night around 11pm, thinking I’d read a few pages of Good Talk before I dozed off. The next thing I knew, it was 2am, and I had finished the book. I was a little bit teary-eyed and the dogs were finally back asleep after I’d woken them a handful of times by chuckling into the nighttime silence.

    There was so much here that felt familiar, and that meant a great deal to me because I rarely see these experiences represented in books:

    • The strange, conflicting, unsolicited messages one gets as a writer of color. (“Ethnic sells.” “Don’t ghettoize yourself with ethnic writing.” “God, if you can’t get a job with the whole diversity thing, the rest of us are fucked.”)
    • The excitement and near-wonder I felt in 2008, watching a multiracial presidential candidate talk candidly about race. (“We took bets on what would bring him down, which is what you do when you’re trying to break your own heart before your country does it for you.”)
    • The baffling, infuriating experience of being mistaken for “the help” and then having to explain to friends and family that you are not imagining that you’ve been mistaken for the help. (“Sometimes, you go along with it and pretend nothing happened. Sometimes, you hold your breath until the feeling of wanting to be believed passes. Sometimes, you weigh explaining against staying quiet and know they’re both just different kinds of heavy.”)

    There was plenty here that was unfamiliar to my experience, too–particularly the expectations around marriage in some East Indian families, and the poignant, hilarious discussions that Mira and her son, Z, have about race. I appreciate those, too, for the windows they provide into conversations that I’ve never had to have.

    I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the art, with its collage of drawings and photos. I loved how the photos situated me in particular places (in a way drawn backgrounds might not have). The way that Jacob cut out her figure drawings of the characters and overlaid these onto the background photos created a fitting tension–I was often aware that the characters were both part of the environment and separate from it, which is how I often feel as a person of color in the U.S.

    Perhaps my favorite aspect of the book is how Jacob uses the graphic memoir form to illustrate what we do and don’t say to one another. In the dialogue, asterisks often point to footnotes that reveal unspoken truths underlying what’s said outright. Sometimes, whole panels depict the difference between what we say and what we think but don’t share. My favorite page in the whole book enacts this, and I leave you with that page, harrowing and honest in what it reveals and conceals:

    drawing of Mira and Z, her son, with text, from page 177 of Good Talk

    View all my reviews

  • You’re Like My Yo-Yo That Glowed in the Dark, July 1, 2019: I’ve discovered that blogging–about my writerly happenings, anyway–is not my forte. When I get the urge to write, ye olde blog is not where I turn. These last few months have been hectic and wonderful and make me look back on my previous entry–from January!–and think, “Wow, what was chapping your ass?” Or, more tenderly, “Wow, that was a rough winter, wasn’t it?” 

But now it’s summer and in Portland, the sun’s come out to stay, at least for a few months, and has made me want to turn back to this space and make it something new. So, I offer here some links to me chatting about the good changes in my life–a new job, an Oregon Literary Fellowship–and then turn us toward a review! I love reviewing books, and usually do so on Goodreads, but for some reason, it never occurred to me to share these on my blog. But what better account of my days could there be than a reckoning of my reading? So, without further introduction, may I present

The Book of DelightsThe Book of Delights by Ross Gay

 

Among the delights of this book–not counting Ross Gay’s prose, which in many essayettes takes unforeseen turns into parentheticals that maneuver away from the ostensible subject, and that taught me to follow Gay’s mind fluttering away and then back, like the brilliant hummingbird that spends its days at my feeder but nevertheless has time to swing through the ever-blooming camellias, making me realize that I am that bird’s diversion, not the flowers–are these below, a few of the many that took me by surprise, and that spring up even now that the book is finished:

The moments that made me laugh aloud, like the dream of his mother, which does not sound like a delightful dream at all, but which offered delight in the relief of waking from it, and further, in the strange ways our brains make sense while we sleep, and further still, in callbacks in later essayettes, which made me laugh all over again.

The recognition that what one experiences as delight–napping in public, for instance–may not be a shared delight, or may in fact be a shared delight, but one that other folks, in other bodies, with other genders, might feel less safe partaking in, and so might be a delight limned with worry or fear, but a delight nevertheless.

Having heard Ross Gay read a few times, I then heard each essayette as if read aloud in his voice–not his writerly, on-the-page voice, but the voice that is made by his lungs and larynx, his teeth and tongue and lips and cheeks. If you have not had such luck as to attend a Ross Gay reading, may I recommend Commonplace and Code Switch, both of which are, in their entirety, not just in these episodes–you guessed it–delights.

Not least of which is Ross Gay’s presence in the world, his ability to name the moments of his year with such wonder and honesty. During the same time that Gay was writing these Delights–August 2016 to August 2017–I was undertaking my own project of writing poems based on words overused and misused by Trump, and undertaking, though dramatic, sounds right. While Gay was carefully pulling sweet and strangely shaped carrots from the soil to feed us (and by this I mean, metaphorically, these essayettes, but also literal carrots–see the July 4th entry), I was digging a burial plot (and by this I mean, I saw the world as a place of mourning and had forgotten that, one day, grass and flowers might grow again atop that plot). So, delight to know how differently someone experienced that time, and delight to be reminded that I encountered delights then, too, for Gay has reminded me of them, for they are not so unlike his.

View all my reviews

So, 2018 happened. I woke up in 2019 to a confusion of seasons: frost on the ground, puddles slicked with a thin skin of ice, but in the camellia in my backyard, three bright pink flowers and a verdant hummingbird still going about his business. I want to take this as a prediction for the year ahead–something vague but optimistic about every ending also being a beginning–but what those birds and blossoms tell me sounds more like an old truth, the one to which I’ve been waking for a long time. “Good morning,” they say. “Prepare to be bewildered.”

I won’t go into all the ways that the last year has baffled and confounded me. Dear Reader, I’m sure you can already name at least half of them. Suffice it to say, the first poem I published this year was about gun violence, and so was the last.

Lest I start sounding like doom and gloom were my only companions these last few months, here’s a reason for celebration: On my birthday, I heard that my new poetry manuscript, “Again,” was accepted for publication by Airlie Press! This is the book that arose from the Inauguries project, and it’s due out in Fall 2020, right in time for the next round of U.S. presidential elections.

What’s more, Airlie is a collective, so when my manuscript was selected, I also became part of the press’ editorial board. I’m delighted to be part of the collective, to have the opportunity to promote the work of other poets, and to select and edit future manuscripts. Airlie’s emphasis is on poets from the Pacific Northwest, so I’m also looking forward to becoming more deeply engaged in the literary community in Oregon through my work with the press. This is what I’m most excited about for the year ahead.

It wouldn’t be a proper New Year’s blog post without turning my gaze back toward what I read in 2018. I spent time with many good books this year, but if I had to choose a few favorites, these would be the ones:

Nonfiction
Pilgrim at Tinker CreekAnnie Dillard
Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much MoreJanet Mock
Between the World and MeTa-Nehisi Coates
No Time to Spare: Thinking About What MattersUrsula K. Le Guin
Vacationland: True Stories from Painful BeachesJohn Hodgman
The Path Between Us: An Enneagram Journey to Healthy RelationshipsSuzanne Stabile

Fiction
Exit WestMohsin Hamid
An American MarriageTayari Jones
The Consuming FireJohn Scalzi
The OverstoryRichard Powers
CirceMadeline Miller
There ThereTommy Orange
Friday BlackNana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Poetry
Good Stock Strange BloodDawn Lundy Martin
Don’t Call Us DeadDanez Smith
My ArielSina Queyras
Silk PoemsJen Bervin

Children’s Books
A Day in the Life of Marlon BundoJill Twiss

With that, I bid adieu to 2018, and welcome 2019, with all the wonder and weirdness, the splendor and stupefaction it will undoubtedly bring!

But life carries on, and now the weather’s cooled and the sun’s down and I’m only astounded by the neighborhood flora intermittently, so I thought I’d hop online to say hello and do what I meant to do, before May turns to June.

About that story: In March 2016, I woke up in a hotel room in Oregon with a first line in my head. “First the baby died, then the dog died.” It could have been the beginning of the worst country song ever, or it could have been my subconscious trying to make sense of a deep mourning that I had felt for months but couldn’t explain to anyone else, no matter how I approached it. That sentence snuck up on me at dawn, and I curled up in a chair, looked out over the Columbia River, and wrote a draft of the story mostly in one go, with that line repeating as a refrain. It felt like the first time I was attentive to form in a story the way I am in a poem, and although the story isn’t quite personal experience, it allowed me to speak to an emotion I couldn’t name in any other way. Now it’s out in the world. Thank you, Valparaiso Fiction Review, for giving it a home.

 
  • She’s Not a Girl Who Misses Much, January 10, 2018: Happy New Year, folks! I’ve now been living on the West Coast for a full calendar year, and I can see the effect of my new residence all over my work. The new issue of Cream City Review includes four poems I wrote shortly after moving to Oregon, and reading them now, a year later, I can see how much I was trying to make sense of starting over in a new place. Two of the poems take the shape of origin stories, and one is called “Spell to Leave Behind a Life.” The fourth emerged from an experiment, in which I culled all the words spoken by Pearl in The Scarlet Letter and used only those words to write a poem. This might not seem all that significant, except that when I talk about my origin story as a writer, I often recall my junior year of high school, when a teacher assigned me the task of writing a poem from the perspective of a character in a book we read. I chose Pearl and discovered the power of persona. Revisiting Pearl now, twenty-plus years later, was a sort of homecoming.

This last year also saw the publication of my first short story, “Out of Order”, in Literal Latte. The story’s protagonist wakes from an elective process he undertook in his forties to find himself now ninety, lonely and disoriented by his new world. Again, I wasn’t conscious of the questions I was grappling with at the time I was writing–one month after I moved to Oregon–but rereading the story now, it’s clear I was, well, lonely and disoriented, even while I loved (and continue to love) this place.

Those initial feelings have dissipated, I’m happy to say. I’m finally starting to get a feel for the writing communities in the area, and I’ve got two readings coming up in the next two months, with a few more in the works. It feels good to get my work back in front of people, and even better to be with kindred spirits: one reading is for Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse, and the other is part of the Unchaste Readers series. Nasty and unchaste–that’s exactly the kind of company I want to keep.

I’ve also got a new poem, “Now Is Not the Time to Talk About Gun Control,” that will be released on the Broadsided website next week as part of their feature, “Bearing Arms: Responding to Guns in American Culture.” The poem is paired with Kristen Woodward’s startling, provocative “Female Target,” and includes the word Oregunian. (Yes, living here has added to my vocabulary, for better or worse.) I’m excited to see our broadside and those of the other writers and artists vectorized, and I hope that the broadsides spark some conversations, since–if the irony wasn’t clear–now is absolutely the time to talk about gun control. Let’s hope that’s one of the many changes 2018 brings.

As for 2017, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention all the amazing books I read. Without further ado, my favorite reads from 2017 were:

Poetry
Spirit BoxingAfaa Michael Weaver
When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further PossibilitiesChen Chen
Into Each Room We Enter without KnowingCharif Shanahan
Lena: PoemsCassie Pruyn
MagdaleneMarie Howe
3arabi SongZeina Hashem Beck
Hands that Break and ScarSarah A. Chavez
TransformationsAnne Sexton
The Whetting StoneTaylor Mali

Nonfiction
Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American WorldSuzy Hansen
Catastrophic Happiness: Finding Joy in Childhood’s Messy YearsCatherine Newman
We Were Eight Years in Power: An American TragedyTa-Nehisi Coates

Fiction
Alias GraceMargaret Atwood
HomegoingYaa Gyasi
SpoonbendersDaryl Gregory
A Monster CallsPatrick Ness
The Lathe of HeavenUrsula K. Le Guin
Her Body and Other PartiesCarmen Maria Machado
Little Fires EverywhereCeleste Ng

Mixed Genre
Christmas Days: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 DaysJeanette Winterson

Here’s to 2018–may the new year bring you clarity, community, and abundant good reads!

  • Privacy Is My Middle Name, My Last Name Is Control, October 17, 2017: When I was little, my mother told me that in Chinese tradition, someone celebrating a birthday doesn’t receive gifts–they give presents to others. Perhaps there’s some element of truth to that concept; perhaps it was just something my mother told me to help me get over the fact that I wasn’t being fêted with wrapped packages every October. (We were Jehovah’s Witnesses, and watching the rounds of cards and cupcakes on my classmates’ birthdays left me wide-eyed and wanting.) Although I’ve never found any evidence of this supposed practice in the cursory internet searches I’ve conducted, the idea of gift-giving as a way to show gratitude for one more year on this planet has always felt like the right thing to do. Usually I find something shiny and/or delicious to offer to a close friend or to my partner, but this year, I tried something different. I became a book fairy.

I love the idea of finding books in unexpected spots, and in honor of the tenth anniversary of Goodreads, the Book Fairies invited people around the world to hide books in public places. Since it’s also been ten years since I joined that bookish online community, I chose ten books–five of my favorites, five of my partner’s favorites–to share with unsuspecting passersby. I spent my birthday walking around the greater Portland area, leaving books in my wake. Here, you can see a few in their not-at-all-natural habitat:

Zombies... on a bench!

Poetry for would-be picnickers

Who wouldn't want to stumble across Jeanette Winterson in a forest?

(If you squint–and are equipped with magical CSI-style photo enhancement–you can probably make out the titles: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie WarJagged with LoveWritten on the Body.)

I was also celebrating something else that day. After a hundred days of intense writing, followed by another hundred and sixty days of hemming and hawing, rearranging and revising, I put the finishing touches on a new poetry manuscript! “Again” began as the Inauguries project–my attempt at coming to terms with the Trump presidency and at stealing the language back from his mouth. While I was in Vermont, other writers encouraged me to see if there might be a book in that project, and as it turns out, there is. (Well, a manuscript, anyway. It’ll be up to the fine folks who read for poetry presses to figure out if there’s actually a book there.) In any case, I felt relieved and triumphant to see all those poems stacked together, to read them out loud over and over and feel the heft of the words in my mouth. Sometimes it’s the mere making of the thing that matters.

And finally, one last celebration: Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse is in print! It arrived at my house a few days ago, and I spent hours absorbed in it. It’s been quite some time since an anthology has caught me up like that. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that it includes some of my favorite poets (too many to name), but there were also many poets whose names I didn’t recognize, and their work floored me, too. Grace Bauer and Julie Kane did a marvelously nasty job of putting the anthology together, and their section titles’ nods to singers and songwriters take after my own heart. Thanks to all the nasty poets out there for the song and swagger, the rhythm and resistance. You’re a gift, too.

 
  • Tomorrow’s Chances Feel Like a Singing God, July 30, 2017: Last Sunday, I went for a hike, as I do most weekends, and when I came back from my trek in the mountains, a message was waiting on my phone. Jenine Gordon Bockman, editor of Literal Latte , had called to let me know that my short story, “Out of Order,” had won the magazine’s fiction prize! I did a little dance right there at the trailhead, although the dance didn’t last too long, as I was pretty wobbly-legged by then.

This was (is!) big news for me. I’ve been writing fiction for a while, but I’ve only been sending it out to magazines for the last year or so. In that year, a few editors have written back some kind notes, but all of them passed on publishing my stories. I was beginning to think I ought to throw in the towel, especially with stories like “Out of Order.” It’s science fiction and nearly 8,000 words long, both of which put it outside the scope of most literary journals. So, it was a surprise, a delight, and a confidence-boost to hear not only that Literal Latte was interested in publishing “Out of Order” but also that they’d chosen it for their fiction award. The story is due to come out in their Fall issue, when I’m sure I will babble about it on the blog all over again.

In other news… Rattle posted my poem, “I Tell Death, Eventually, as their poem of the day back on June 23. Although I’ve been reading Rattle for years, it wasn’t until this last month that I realized what a supportive and extensive poetry community editor Tim Green has built, especially through the digital components of the journal. In the days following my poem’s posting, I received more kind emails from readers than I had in the previous ten years. People were generous with their own stories about loss and grief and mortality, and I appreciated their candor and vulnerability. Beyond that, it was also heartening just to know that so many people were out there reading poetry on any given day. At a time when literary and arts programs are so often disparaged and subject to budget cuts, knowing there are so many other poetry-lovers out there gives me hope.

And speaking of budget cuts, I wanted to give a shout out to the editors at Crab Orchard Review , which is in the process of converting from a print to an online-only journal in the wake of spending restrictions and staffing reductions. Allison JosephJon Tribble, and Carolyn Alessio have been putting together one of the best journals out there for years, and I’m honored to have my poem, “The Gauntlet,” included in one of the final print issues. “The Gauntlet” is one of the few poems I’ve written where I directly address race–in particular, the unease I felt at being one of the few people of color in my old neighborhood in Iowa–and I’m grateful to the folks at Crab Orchard Review for publishing it. (I’m also grateful that now, for the first time in my life, I live in a racially and culturally diverse neighborhood. I still think a lot about race, and it would be foolish in the current political environment to say I feel unworried and entirely safe, but I don’t feel the same kind of fear I did in places where I was the only person of color around. There’s power–and peace–in numbers.)

  • The Girl I Used To Love Lives In This Yellow House, May 17, 2017: And then it was May. The last few months have been quite the marathon, in no small part due to the Inauguries. After the leisurely wonderland of Vermont, I came back to Oregon and dizzied myself trying to squeeze a poem a day around the obligations of humdrum, ordinary life. I woke up in the wee hours to write before work, stayed up bleary-eyed in hotel rooms trying to compose poems after traveling all day, and faced more than a few occasions where I thought it might be best to throw in the towel altogether. If nothing else, the project reminded me that I am, at heart, a stubborn fool.

I still have a list of words I wanted to use–and Trump is picking up new favorite terms every day–but I’m happy that the 100 days are over. (If only the administration were as short-lived as this project was.) Maybe I’ll revisit some of those other words at a later date, but for now I’m taking a much needed rest from poem-writing and turning instead to seeing whether the Inauguries have the making of a manuscript in them. It feels strange to try to split up and rearrange the poems into a book, but folks keep encouraging me to get these babies out beyond the blog, so I’m giving it a shot.

In the months since my last post, I’ve amassed quite the list of shout-outs that have remained shut-in while I was engrossed with writing the Inauguries. So, at long last…

Cheers to Peter Kahn, Ravi Shankar, and Patricia Smith, for editing The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks. The anthology riffs on the Golden Shovel form created by Terrance Hayes, which borrows a line from one of Brooks’ poems to form the final words in the lines of a new poem. The anthology is a great way to get acquainted with a wide range of contemporary poets or to revisit your favorite Gwendolyn Brooks poem. My poem in the anthology draws on a line from “Riders to the Blood-Red Wrath,” which is not my favorite Brooks poem, but how I could I resist the lure of a line like “the national anthem vampires at the blood”? (And what is my favorite Brooks poem, you ask? Depends on the day, but “The Mother” and “Beverly Hills, Chicago” are probably the top two contenders.)

Hurrah for Laura Madeline Wiseman for editing Bared: Contemporary Poetry and Art on Bras and Breasts. The anthology includes some of my favorite poets: Sarah A Chavez, Susanna Childress, Denise Duhamel, Leslie Adrienne Miller, Stacey Waite… Too many brilliant folks to name them all. I’ve got two poems in the anthology–about breasts, not bras. One’s an oldie but goodie from The Body Is No Machine, and the other, “No Jeremiad,” is brand new to the world.

Hosannas to Mary Ann Miller, editor of the new journal, Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry , and Jeremy Schraffenberger, who interviewed me for the journal. Mary Ann was the force behind St. Peter’s B-List: Contemporary Poems Inspired by the Saints, and she was kind enough to think of me for this first issue of Presence. Jeremy’s questions helped me to revisit the process of writing and revising No Confession, No Mass, and I suspect some of his questions about the efficacy of poetry as protest led me in the direction of the Inauguries.

And bravi to Mary Vermillion and all the folks at Mount Mercy University, who gave me such a warm welcome when I visited in April. Mary live-tweeted the Q&A, during which I read the first drafts of a couple of poems from No Confession, No Mass. The drafts were awful, but that was the point, and it was the first time I’ve ever read a shaggy early draft aloud to a room full of strangers. (I highly recommend it for its humbling properties.) Mary’s colleague, Joe Sheller, wrote a generous blog post about the reading, as well as its aftermath, when I mistook Joe for a ghost. (It was a long day, and the students and I had been talking about paranormal investigators. Yes, let’s blame it on that.) I also got to chat with Mary a bit about the memoir she co-wrote with her husband, Ben, about his gender transition, and I am eagerly awaiting its publication. Best of all, the students at Mount Mercy were thoughtful and inquisitive and bold–it was a true pleasure to talk with them. A few asked questions that prompted me to reveal my fears and qualms about writing non-fiction. (It turns out I’m fond of the veil, however thin, that fiction and poetry allow me to draw over my life.) But because I find it hard to refuse a challenge, especially a self-issued one, while I’m on my post-Inauguries mini-hiatus from poetry, I’m trying my hand at some essays on race. Time will tell whether I can get over my unease enough to send these out into the world, but for now, at least, the writing feels necessary and surprising, so I’ll follow it where it takes me.

  • Swingin’ on the Front Porch, Swingin’ on the Lawn, February 27, 2017: This is my last week in Johnson, Vermont, where the kind folks at the Vermont Studio Center have given me space to write and to be among other artists for the month of February. There’s been much furious scribbling, broadening of horizons, and exchanging of ideas. (Also, a wee bit of carousing, a lot of laughter, heaps of good food, and a mid-winter bonfire. This place is luscious.)

The residency has given me encouragement to be braver and less polished with my poems, including the Inauguries, which have definitely begun to absorb the influence of this place and the people I’ve met here. Being away from home has also offered some necessary distance from stories and poems that I should have abandoned long ago. Darlings have been murdered! Drafts have been trashed! Let the new language come flooding in!

While I’ve been here, Unsplendid put out a new double issue, which includes a villanelle and a sonnet I wrote. Editor Doug Basford’s preface is worth checking out for its thoughtful articulation of some of the relationships between politics and poetry.

Also, speaking of politics and poetry, the new issue of Rattle is out, and it features poems by civil servants–folks who’ve worked for the CIA, FDA, EPA, the Census Bureau–which just goes to show we poets are everywhere. I’ve got a poem in there, too, in the poets-not-affiliated-with-the-government section. I’ll have to wait until I’m home to read the rest of the issue, but I can tell you my poem was inspired by a dream in which Death tried to serve me a pie. No lie.

  • The Friday Night Charades of Youth, February 7, 2017: I’m holed up at the Vermont Studio Center for a month, where I’m working on new poems, fiddling with some half-formed short stories, and marveling at the snow. (Much easier to marvel when I’ve got nowhere to go, when I’m just strolling through its glitter and waking to find how deep it’s grown overnight.) I’m still writing Inauguries, too, and have discovered that those poems might be less about reclaiming language than about documenting the emotional terrain of this strange moment in our history. The poems have often taken a surreal turn, which feels apt–if fact and truth are questionable, I suppose reality is, too. And, especially in recent poems, I can’t seem to get away from speaking from a collective voice. Who is this “we” that keeps appearing? As the Magic 8 Ball says, “Cannot predict now; Ask again later.”

This moment feels unpredictable, but as Sarah Einstein and Sandra Gail Lambert point out in the editorial note to their online anthology, Older Queer Voices: The Intimacy of Survival, this isn’t so much an unfamiliar world as “one we remembered well and had hoped was gone for good.” Einstein and Lambert assembled the collection of writing by older queerfolk “to recreate the edifices of care and activism that we once constructed for ourselves and then perhaps abandoned because they were no longer needed.” I’m grateful to have poems in the anthology; grateful to have made it to the age where I may be an “older” queer; grateful to have had friends, teachers, artists, and authors who gave me the strategies I needed to survive.

And speaking of survival, speaking of age: the folks at Silver Birch Press are running a poetry and prose series on their blog called “Me, At 17,” that precarious time on the cusp of adulthood when so many of us learn what it means to outlive our childhood selves. I’ve got a poem there, too, and I’m excited that the series represents such a wide variety of experiences of that particular time in life. (Happy, too, to see so many LGBTQ authors in the series. Represent!) If you decide to check out the poem, you’ll have the extra treat of getting to see what I looked like back in the ’90s: Long hair. Penciled eyebrows. Impish glint in the eyes.

  • A Little More Before He Knows His Own, January 20, 2017: Today I began writing my way through the first 100 days of the Trump administration. For some time now, I’ve been collecting words that Trump uses too often, words that I once loved but now can hear only through his mouth, his voice. I want to feel the rich history of those words again. I want to remember what they used to mean. Today I began stealing that language back.

I’ll keep writing an Inaugury every day until April 29. It feels a little risky, a little strange, to write a poem and immediately put it out into the world for anyone to read, but I also can’t imagine a better time to summon up my pluck and weirdness.

A throw of the dice will never abolish chance, but it will help me remember how much this time we’re living in is a gamble, is an opportunity. So, I’ll be rolling the dice each morning to determine the line and syllable count for that day’s poems. Dissent is not a game, but sometimes a magic bag of dice still comes in handy.

Today’s poem is “Huge.” If you’re in need of a little more poetry in your day anytime in the next few months, stop back for more Inauguries. And in the meantime, if there are words you’d like to help me snatch back from Trump’s mouth, send me a note or leave me a comment on Goodreads, and I’ll add them to my list.

Peace and solidarity, y’all.

  • For older, archived blog posts, visit me at Goodreads!