But first, books:
The Portrait of a Mirror (A. Natasha Joukovsky) - “Few things are more alluring: that final sliver of uncertainty and danger and risk fanning your desire for more more more as you wade like Tantalus, knee-deep and dying of thirst for approval from someone you very much approve.”
Dreaming of You (Melissa Lozada-Oliva) - “We say we miss them but we don’t mean them. We mean the autumn we discovered them, when we had our headphones in and felt like we were a movie…We mean a history that was never written for us, those words that found themselves in our mouths and danced out so easily.”
A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance (Hanif Abdurraqib) - “I’ve run out of language to explain the avalanche of anguish I feel when faced with this world, and so if I can’t make sense of this planet, I’m better off imagining another.”
I think I’m going to love: Dear Senthuran (Akwaeke Emezi), Long Division (Kiese Laymon), When We Cease to Understand the World (Benjamin Labatut, trans. Adrian Nathan West)
Recs of Recs (Books I am reading because of You): People We Meet on Vacation (Emily Henry), Outlawed (Anna North)
(book drop low low - donations are in hot and fresh! I am going to be doing book drops with ARCs and BIPOC authors later this month. We already had one almost exclusively hardcovers drop in July)
I wrote a poem for Entropy Magazine!!! Check it out here (you might have to scroll a bit to find it)
A little more on the piece: I submitted this to the #finalpoems series, to answer the call for the poem we would leave at the end of the world, and “because one yet wants to believe that poetry can still be about the catastrophe and beauty of one’s own heart, and the generous giving away of those words to another.”
Here, I give away the composition of my flesh in inverse, by dissecting my compost. When I imagine the end of the world, I can’t help but to reflect on the carnal intimacy of what I have put into my body while alive. I revere what is a part of me, but my poem yearns to grant dignity to the bits I discarded. Is there morality to what we trash? After all, my body will rejoin the earth someday, bringing human to the humus. May I disintegrate with a grace as rare as life.
Soft Spots
Have you been following the Britney Spears conservatorship nightmare? This article did THE MOST and is by two reporters (Jia Tolentino and Ronan Farrow) whose books I read and admired
I have *googly eyes* for this short story that apparently blew the lid off the internet AND is going to be adapted to the screen soon!
Speaking of screen adaptations, I try to keep track of the most exciting books hitting the screen and add them to my BookShop shelf dedicated to just that!
Are you an epidemiologist or are you just STILL invested in COVID? You should be! Here are some nuanced travel considerations this summer if you’re vaxxed.
2021 books in translation !!! This list is amazing (I think my TBR pile is breeding with itself?).
If you are looking to easily shop the above list, I added some of the more exciting titles to my Bookshop!