Five Rhymes

We think of people as settling down when they get older, getting more set in their ways. But that hasn’t been my experience. Instead as I get older, I’m itching to get weirder. I think that in my twenties, I was so determined to carve out space for myself in the world. And now that I have that space, I don’t really feel like I have anything to prove. So it’s safe to ask some big questions about who I actually am. I’m more up for rethinking what I thought I knew. I like the idea of not being content with the apples you can grasp.

Shay

Is it that we actively pull ourselves into being by our very actions, our choices laying the foundations brick by brick for who we are and who we will become…?

Or is it that what pulls us into being, what pushes us toward action, is the ache, is our future selves, is the wisdom in our present yearning, foretold and prophesied by a future world who wants us to become who we inevitably need to become to create itself…?

Yes.

Christina

Maybe this swirl of awe and marvel and good intent for the world and gratitude for ourselves in it is where all the religions came from. That is where our feel for the sacred in the world is conjured, surely, the ordinary, staggering mystery of where it all comes from before it is born here among us and where it all goes after it dies away from us, the starry midnight courtship of the heart that whispers, “What is gone is still with you, still here. As you will be.”

Stephen

Not every experience needs to be put in the basket of “turn this into a beautiful piece of writing for the people”, but everything goes in the basket of – perhaps there is more to this than meets the eye.

Marlee

This is the inheritance that no one ever told you about—wild and curious, unblinking, sorrow-eyed and courageous chested, shuddering the rain from its feathers, ready to launch into the dusking light.

Martin

2022 in Reading

Back at it and even less able to provide commentary than I was this time last year, but hot damn I love books.

(Previously: 2021 in Reading)

LegendRough Guide to Ratings
🎭 – Plays
📝 – Poetry
📖 – Books (Fiction)
📓 – Books (Nonfiction)
💬 – Graphic Novels
❤︎ = Yes
❤︎❤︎ = Oh Yes
❤︎❤︎❤︎ = Oh Hell Yes
❤︎❤︎❤︎❤︎ = Priestdaddy
  1. 💬 Five Worlds: The Sand Warrior – Mark Siegel, Alexis Siegel, Xanthe Bouma,  Matt Rockefeller,  Boya Sun
  2. 📖 Pirate Freedom – Gene Wolfe
  3. 💬 Thirsty Mermaids – Kat Leyh ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  4. 🔄 📖 Going Postal – Terry Pratchett ❤︎❤︎
  5. 📖 A Dark and Starless Forest – Sarah Hollowell
  6. 📖 Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
  7. 🔄 📓 The Do-it-yourself Guide to Fighting the Big Motherfuckin’ Sad — Adam Gnade 
  8. 💬 The Daughters of Ys – M.T. Anderson, Jo Rioux
  9. 📓 How to Live, or A Life of Montaigne – Sarah Bakewell
  10. 🔄 📓 Burnout – Emily & Amelia Nagoski
  11. 🔄 📖 Small Gods – Terry Pratchett ❤︎❤︎
  12. 📓 At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life – Fenton Johnson ❤︎❤︎
  13. 📖 A Psalm for the Wild-Built – Becky Chambers ❤︎❤︎
  14. 📖 Luster – Raven Leilani ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  15. 📓 A Primer for Forgetting – Lewis Hyde ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  16. 📓 The Artist’s Way – Julia Cameron ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  17. 📓 Tiny House Living – Ryan Mitchell
  18. 💬 Amulet Book 1 – Kazu Kibuishi
  19. 💬 Amulet Book 2 – Kazu Kibuishi
  20. 💬 Amulet Book 3 – Kazu Kibuishi
  21. 💬 Amulet Book 4 – Kazu Kibuishi
  22. 💬 Amulet Book 5 – Kazu Kibuishi
  23. 💬 Amulet Book 6 – Kazu Kibuishi
  24. 💬 Amulet Book 7 – Kazu Kibuishi
  25. 💬 Amulet Book 8 – Kazu Kibuishi
  26. 📖 Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
  27. 📖 River of Teeth – Sarah Gailey ❤︎
  28. 📓 The Four Agreements – don Miguel Ruiz
  29. 📖 The Echo Wife – Sarah Gailey ❤︎❤︎
  30. 📓 When Strangers Meet – Kio Stark
  31. 📖 Sing, Unburied, Sing – Jesmyn Ward ❤︎
  32. 🔄📓 The Sabbath – Abraham Joshua Heschel ❤︎
  33. 📓 On Imagination – Mary Ruefle
  34. 📓 The Timeless Way of Building – Christopher Alexander ❤︎
  35. 🔄 💬 Mighty Jack – Ben Hatke
  36. 💬 Dancing at the Pity Party – Tyler Feder
  37. 💬 Zita the Spacegirl – Ben Hatke
  38. 📖 A Gentleman in Moscow – Amor Towles ❤︎
  39. 📖 The Decagon House Murders – Yukito Ayatsuji
  40. 💬 Salt Magic – Rebecca Mock & Hope Larson
  41. 📖 Lies Sleeping – Ben Aaronovitch
  42. 🔄 💬 Mighty Jack & Zita the Spacegirl – Ben Hatke
  43. 💬 Making Comics – Lynda Barry ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  44. 📖 A Master of Djinn – P. Djèlí Clark
  45. 💬 Coyote Doggirl – Lisa Hanawalt
  46. 🔄 💬 Mighty Jack and the Goblin King – Ben Hatke ❤︎
  47. 💬 Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? – Roz Chast ❤︎❤︎
  48. 📖 Fair Play – Tove Jansson ❤︎
  49. 📖 Plus One – Christopher Noxon
  50. 💬 Berlin – Jason Lutes ❤︎❤︎
  51. 💬 Your Illustrated Guide to Becoming One with the Universe – Yumi Sakugawa ❤︎
  52. 📖 Matrix – Lauren Groff ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  53. 💬 Belonging – Nora Krug ❤︎❤︎
  54. 💬 My Depression – Elizabeth Swados
  55. 💬 This Woman’s Work – Julie Delporte ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  56. 📖 Shadowshaper – Daniel José Older
  57. 💬 Genderqueer – Maia Kobabe
  58. 📖 Full Dark House – Christopher Fowler
  59. 📓 Polysecure – Jessica Fern
  60. 📖 Spear – Nicola Griffith
  61. 💬 Dying for Attention: a Graphic Memoir of Nursing Home Care – Susan MacLeod
  62. 📓 300 Arguments – Sarah Manguso ❤︎
  63. 📓 More Than Two – Franklin Veaux & Eve Rickert
  64. 📖 Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls – Alissa Nutting
  65. 📓 Notes from Walnut Tree Farm – Roger Deakin ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  66. 📓 Unmastered, A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell – Katherine Angel ❤︎❤︎
  67. 📖 Maxwell’s Demon – Stephen Hall
  68. 📖 Magic for Liars – Sarah Gailey
  69. 📖 A Prayer for the Crown Shy – Becky Chambers
  70. 🔄📓 Pilgrim at Tinker Creek – Annie Dillard ❤︎❤︎❤︎ (last read in 2017)
  71. 📓 Everybody: A Book About Freedom – Olivia Laing ❤︎❤︎
  72. 📖 Detransition, Baby – Torrey Peters ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  73. 📓 The Joy of Small Things – Hannah Jane Parkinson
  74. 📖 Fisher of Bones – Sarah Gailey
  75. 📖 The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – John le Carré
  76. 🔄📓 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write – Sarah Ruhl
  77. 📓 Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again – Katherine Angel ❤︎
  78. 📖 Toad – Katherine Dunn ❤︎
  79. 📖 No One is Talking About This – Patricia Lockwood ❤︎❤︎
  80. 📖 The Impossible Us – Sarah Lotz ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  81. 💬 Sheets – Brenna Thummler
  82. 📓 Priestdaddy – Patricia Lockwood ❤︎❤︎❤︎❤︎
  83. 📖 Upright Women Wanted – Sarah Gailey ❤︎
  84. 📖 When We Were Magic – Sarah Gailey
  85. 📓 Emergent Strategy – adrienne maree brown ❤︎❤︎
  86. 📖 The Daughter of Time – Josephine Tey
  87. 📖 Fantasian – Larissa Pham ❤︎
  88. 📓 A Handbook of Disappointed Fate – Anne Boyer ❤︎
  89. 📓 Love – Leo Buscaglia
  90. 📓 Delight – J.B. Priestley ❤︎❤︎

They are both darkness: they are both lights.

(All these quotes are from A Handbook of Disappointed Fate, Boyer’s collection of essays on poetry, illness, avant-garde creative movements, mutual aid, reading, and crushes.)

After I got sick in late summer 2014, I followed U.S. poetry only from afar, as if walking by a shop window and glancing at it through a glass, even the most necessary uproar too expensive to my health for me to even think of buying […]

This rang so true to how these last two years have changed my relationship to the comics industry—a space I never felt particularly enmeshed in to begin with. Every discussion of online drama or publishing upset or new technology costs far more than I have capacity or inclination to spend. A relief, in some ways, to have that decision taken away from me.

My time in the time of illness has been unmeasurable or ir-measured or a-measured. Yet despite how this time can no longer steadily or predictably submit itself to clocks and calendars, for survival’s sake I still have to try to measure it.

Underlined this because I’m doing my annual workbook on the couch right now, surrounded by a corona of calendar pages and journals and sketchbooks, trying to piece together the fragments of a lost year.

The harm can be studied like anything, every wept tear a textbook, every minute of shallow breathing a monograph, seven hours and fourteen minutes of a sleepless night a textbook a tedious-to-read but potentially useful dissertation on having existed.

It is not as if what is true, right, urgent, and necessary is a light, and what is harm is the darkness. They are both darkness: they are both lights.

yes yes yes yes

15. There will be a lot of sewing last year’s fragments with this year’s threads.

And also:

Poetry is revenge porn against the self by the self.

And finally:

As grim as reading has been for me, reading is not only the private amplification of the human worst. Reading is not merely escapism and militant solitude and everything shirked–that is, reading is not an act exclusive to words and books–and a person can also read the patterns of migrating birds or the lines in a soon-to-be-lover’s palm or the buds of oak trees or the damaged look in an eye or the danger headed this way or the people amassed in the streets. The world existed before books, and it always exists outside of them, and how a person should read is how a person must read, which is at least in duplicate, both always in this world and looking for another.

💛

Hollerin’

It felt as if everyone else had already read Priestdaddy and I was last person to arrive at the Priestdaddy Party and yet when I scream at anyone in earshot about how this is the funniest book I’ve read in years, many of them haven’t heard of it at all. A reminder, then, to holler about the things we love, never assuming they’re old hat to those around us. We can always be the catalyst for someone’s next foray into joy.

Just the Thicket

A zero-to-sixty obsession with Katherine Angel this past week, having never encountered her work before. Just finished Unmastered and a cursory Google reveals that of course it was Olivia Laing who reviewed it in The Guardian when it came out, referring to it as “a giddily joyful book, thicketed with exclamation marks.”

Thicketed!!

I love her. I love that they are peers. I love this game of finding out that people I admire know other people I admire. (See also: endnotes in Unmastered referencing Hélène Cixous.)

This is probably the sign I’ve been waiting for, wondering what book to take when I flee to an island with no internet or cell reception next week. I’ve had Laing’s Everybody, A Book About Freedom sitting on my shelf since it came out, but for some ungodly reason haven’t cracked it. Everything else on my list is a library eBook accessible only via an iPad app and it feels deeply wrong to be reading on an iPad in the wilderness. BRING ME PAPER.

Poetry for Everyone

I contend, though, that there is poetry for everyone. Everyone. Folks who don’t get it just haven’t read the right poems. The stuff we are educated in poetry with during our school days doesn’t help. Too often, “classic” is just a euphemism for worn out. What do I have in common with some crusty old English aristocrat who died 100 years ago? Give me an ill-tempered, one-eyed old birdwatcher who swigs red wine and eats fried chicken from Albertson’s instead.

But I was one of those people, for years and years, who didn’t get it. Then I read a particular poem that knocked my lights out. Words and lines formed together that felt like they were pulled from my own brain. I never looked back. I never had any idea — or intention — that anyone would ever call me a poet until it started happening. It felt pretty good. It felt a little subversive. I love that about it.

Now poetry is part of my every day. I read some every morning. I don’t so much as write poetry as live it. “The purpose of poetry is not to learn more about poetry, but more about life,” Robert Bly said, and I believe him. I tell my poetry kids that poetry is life, how they live their lives, how they share their lives. The study of it is the study of what it means to be alive. What ends up on the page is the least important part of the process.

I really love Chris LaTray.

Ambient Friendship

Bobbie’s on a roll right now.

Social media is built on ambient relationships. You post, you tweet, you share; I read, I listen, I see. Maybe we interact briefly. But I can feel closeness to you without actually having it. 

To make things even more complicated, we can exist on both sides—creators and consumers of other people’s thoughts, and each other’s. But so often I see what you’re doing, you see me, but we’re never quite talking to each other. 

Ambient friendship.

aaaggghhhh