Volume 2, No. 46: Trees & Emergencies & The End of the World + Apple & Honey Scones

Greetings, book and treat people! It snowed for the first time last week—just a dusting that was mostly gone the next day—and it lit something up inside me. I made stew, I baked way more bakes than anyone needs to bake in a day, I did a little dance in the patch of sunlight in my kitchen. The season of light is coming. My body is ready.

Cookie Extravaganza is also fast approaching, so in this week’s Bookish Teatime video, I talk a bit about my planning process. This year I’ll be making ~65 kinds of cookies over the course of three weeks. As you can imagine, my cookie calendar is very detailed!

I’ve never done an all-poetry edition of the newsletter (except the one I wrote about The Sealey Challenge last year), but I just read three brilliant collections, all out this year, and all absolutely breathtaking. I didn’t intend to read them all in a row, but that’s what happened. It made me appreciate each individual collection—they are all so different!—but I also found myself drawing so many connections between them. All of these books are about living through impossible times, loving through impossible times, witnessing impossible times. This week has been an impossible time. Many weeks are. After the shooting in Colorado, I reread and reread Saeed Jones and Chen Chen’s poems about Pulse. Reading them doesn’t feel like comfort, really, or like any kind of balm. It just feels like taking a breath, like permission to grieve.

The Books

Frontlist #1: Alive at the End of the World by Saeed Jones

This beautiful, heartrending collection is about grief, mostly: the big grief of living through these days, in this country, through the mass shootings and the murders of Black people and the attacks on queer and tarns people and the endlessness of it, how all that grief chokes and roils in a body. It’s also about the intimate grief of losing a parent, about loneliness and looking for love and doing creative work. And it’s also about the process of grieving—the act of it, the work of it, the space we do and don’t allow for it. The poems are all so sharp—Jones writes with a cutting precision, there’s weight behind every word. But they also feel like a working through of something, and that’s part of what makes the collection so alive. Everything feels so overwhelming to a lot of us right now. Reading these poems felt like walking into a room full of that overwhelm and just—being in it, witnessing it, looking at it, feeling it.

There are four poems titled ‘Alive at the End of the World’ scattered throughout the collection. Here’s one:

I hear the sirens and run
a hand over my silhouette,
surprised not to find bullet
wounds, burns, or history,

but now, ambered under
this streetlight, he pulls me in
for a kiss again and I decide,
briefly, to let the world kill

itself however it chooses: yes,
I hear the sirens and I am their
scream but tonight, I will moan
a future into my man's mouth.

Everything I love about this collection is here in this poem. There are many, many other poems I love—a multipart prose poem inspired by a question someone asks at a poetry reading; another about a scientist who builds a robot; a numbered series of poems all titled ‘Grief’. All of them echo each other, haunt each other, stream in and out of each other. They all hold the pain and exhaustion and defiance and joy of the speaker in the poem above. Perhaps every word in this book is just a different way of saying, “I am alive at the end of the world.”

Frontlist #2: The Trees Witness Everything by Victoria Chang

This is a collection of short poems—various Japanese syllabic forms known as wakas. There are many kinds of wakas, each with their own syllabic arrangement. Chang uses a variety of these wakas, and, as she writes in the notes, occasionally breaks form. Wakas, she explains, translates to “Japanese poem”, and specifically refers to court poetry written in Japan in the sixth through fourteenth centuries.

The other interesting thing about this book is that all the poem titles are based on the titles of W.S. Merwin poems. Here’s what Chang says about her process, which is fascinating:

These poems are also based on W.S. Merwin’s poem titles, as a way to subconsciously avoid preconceived subject matter, in hindsight, and as a way to inhabit another person’s mind. I selected Merwin’s titles because of how open they seem. I selected a Merwin title as a prompt, then one syllabic form at random from the above, and then wrote a poem. I would often read the Merwin poem first, but not always.

It’s hard to describe what these poems are about, what they feel like. Many of them describe what’s ordinary—birds, trees, sitting at a desk writing, the changing seasons, weather. Chang seems interested in surfaces—in what something looks like and what it hides, in the story a moment or experience tells, and the story we hear. Many of the poems are full of questions that twist whatever came before them into new shapes. There’s a quality of excavation, as if Chang is digging around, playfully and thoughtfully, in a field of words, turning up some things that make sense and some things that don’t. Here’s one where she writes explicitly about surfaces:

In Autumn

It is not autumn,
it is spring. I hear the geese
who survived the trip.
Each time a bird closes its
wings, it is praying.
If I prayed that many times,
could I read the sky, what it's
trying to tell me?
Nothing known has a surface.

There are so many shapes to this poem, to all of these poems. I read them for the beauty of the words, for the sheer pleasure of the music in them. Then I read them again, looking for the surfaces, looking beyond the surfaces, trying to find what was buried beneath. Here’s another one I can’t stop thinking about, ‘First Sight’:

I see an outline
of you everywhere I look.
We spend our lives trying to
see our insides. Have
you ever watched the trees turn
black before the sky?

All of these poems, to me, seem to be all surface and no surface at all. They are lovey, shimmering, little jewels, like bright stars twinkling in the night sky. And inside of all that loveliness is a whole lot of truth and confusion and mess, infinite unanswerable questions. They are themselves, they contain themselves. I love this line about fall, but Chang could be talking about her own poems, too: “If / you think fall is made /of dying, you are wrong, it / is made up of the future.”

Frontlist #3: Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced An Emergency by Chen Chen

Chen Chen is one of my favorite poets working today, if not my favorite. I adored his first collection, When I Grow Up I Want to be a List of Further Possibilities, and I adored his second collection—maybe even more. I’ve been trying to figure out what it is about his work that makes it feel so revolutionary to me. I think it’s that he takes joy, and play, so seriously. His poems are flamboyant. They are full of fierce joy. They are raucous, sometimes extraordinarily silly. But even when he’s writing about things that are not fun, or joyful, or lovely—which he does a lot—the playfulness is still apparent in structure of the poems. Play is what makes them. Chen Chen is certainly not the only contemporary poet I love who writes about joy, or who writes about joy in the midst of grief and pain and heartache. But he comes at it from a unique angle. The speaker of these poems refuses to stop playing, to stop being his beautiful gay self, who loves soup and sex—not for anyone or anything. The poems feel untame and uncontainable, too big for the page.

It’s hard to explain how all of this works in the poems—you really should just go read them. In ‘Origin Story’, he writes about identity and whiteness and the racism of the academy and finding his way through the world as a gay Asian poet. It’s a beautiful poem, a big poem, a serious poem about real pain. But that does not stop Chen Chen from playing. One line reads:

In college, a poetry professor asked, Are you from Whitman or from Dickinson? which sounded like he was asking, Are you American?

There’s so much controlled fury in this line, so much sitting just beneath the words. And then, later, there’s this line:

In the tingly hairy gay sense, I’m from Whitman.

I just can’t get over the delight in this line, the contradictions in it, the way Chen Chen messes with expectations, turns everything on its head, twists the sad and the hard and the bad with beautiful images of bodily joy, queer desire, ice cream, flowers—and on and on and on.

There are so many poems I love, too many to name. There are several long poems about the first year of the pandemic, which feel a little bit like diaries, and made me cry. There are poems about going to grad school in Texas, a heartbreaking poem about the Pulse shooting, so many hard and beautiful poems about familial homophobia. The love poems are exquisite and exuberant. I could go on and on forever. I wanted to savor every word in this book. It is full of softness and giddiness, ferocity and loss, the absolutely weird miracle of being alive.

The Bake

The other morning, when I woke up to snow flurries, I didn’t even stop to think. I pulled a cookbook off my shelf (Baking with Dorie by Dorie Greenspan), flipped through it, and had these scones in the oven before I’d finished my first cup of tea. There’s something about the quiet stillness of snow that activates my baking gene.

Iced Honey & Apple Scones

Very lightly adapted from Baking with Dorie

These scones are subtle and lovely. They’re soft, not too sweet, and full of appley goodness—perfect for a cold morning in early winter.

Ingredients

For the scones:

• 272 grams (2 cups) all-purpose flour

• 75 grams (1/2 cup) spelt flour

• 1 Tbs baking powder

• 1/4 tsp baking soda

• 1/4 tsp salt

• 1 orange

• 3/4 stick (6 Tbs or 85 grams) unsalted butter, cold and cut into small cubes

• 1 medium apple, peeled, cored, and diced

• 1/4 cup (60 ml) honey

• 1 egg

• 3/4 cup (180 ml) milk

For the icing:

• 60 grams (1/2 cup) powdered sugar

• ~1 Tbs milk

Preheat the oven to 400. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a silicone baking mat.

Combine the flours in a large mixing bowl. Add the baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Zest the orange directly into the bowl and whisk to combine. Scatter the cubed butter over the flour, and use your fingertips to break it up. Keep mixing and smushing until the most of the butter has broken down into smallish pieces (some larger ones are fine). Add the apple and mix to combine. Pour the honey over everything and use a fork to mix it up a bit.

In a small bowl, whisk together the egg and milk. Add the juice from the zested orange. Pour the mixture over the dry ingredients and mix until the flour is just moistened. This is a wet and sticky dough—you just want to mix until all the flour has disappeared. Don’t worry if it doesn’t hold together.

Using a 1/4 cup measure (or something similar, no need to be exact), scoop out 12 portions of dough and arrange them on the prepared baking sheet. Bake for 18-20 minutes, until golden brown on top. Let cool on a wire rack.

To make the icing: Put the sugar in a small bowl and add the milk a little at a time, stirring, until the you have a shiny, pourable icing. Drizzle the icing over the cooled scones. They’re best the day the made, but still pretty good toasted for a few days after that.

The Bowl & The Beat

The Bowl: Maple Roasted Tofu & Winter Squash

This is a recipe from Melissa Clark’s fabulous cookbook Dinner, one I started making ages ago and is now so familiar that I don’t have to open the book. It requires a few pans, but it basically boils down to: make a sauce, chop some veggies and tofu, roast them with the sauce. You can make it with practically anything, too.

Preheat the oven to 425. Prepare your veggies and tofu: cut a block of tofu into rectangular slabs and pat the slabs dry with paper towels or a cloth. Slice a delicata squash in half lengthwise, seed it, and slice it into thick half-moons. Slice a few red onions into wedges. Cut a head of broccoli or two into florets. Arrange the tofu slices on one tray, the squash and onions on another, and the broccoli on a third. Sprinkle salt and pepper over everything.

Make the sauce: In a small saucepan, combine 1/2 cup maple syrup, 3-5 teaspoons grated ginger, and a pinch of chili powder (or Aleppo pepper). Simmer until it reduces by about a third. Stir in 6ish tablespoons of olive oil.

Spread about one third of the sauce over the squash and onions and put the tray in the oven. To the remaining sauce, add 4 teaspoons of soy sauce and a teaspoon of sherry vinegar. Brush the tofu slices generously with the sauce. Into the oven they go.

Roast the tofu and squash for about 20 minutes. Flip the tofu slices, brush the tops with more sauce, and bake for another 15-20 minutes. The squash should cook in 30-35 minutes total. Once it’s done, toss the rest of the sauce with the broccoli and put that in the oven. (Unless you have three racks in your oven, in which case you can do it all at the same time!)

Cook the tofu until it’s golden and crisp and the broccoli until it’s nicely browned around the edges. Take everything out of the oven. Serve with rice, extra sauce if you have any, and chopped scallions and cilantro.

The Beat: Kings of B’more by R. Eric Thomas, read by Torian Brackett

In the last few newsletters of the year, I like to highlight some great audiobooks I’ve listened to that never made it into The Beat—usually just because of timing! This is a joyful YA romp that's super gay and super fun. Linus and Harrison have been besties for years. When Linus announces that he’s moving out of state, Harrison decides the only way to make sure they stay friends is to have a Ferris Bueller-style grand adventure. I love how deeply focused on friendship this book is—Thomas celebrates just how messy, sacred, life-saving, beautiful, and complicated queer friendship can be. There’s a fair amount of hard stuff in this, especially around anxiety and racism, but there is also a whole lot of queer Black joy. The narration is wonderful. Brackett gives Harrison and Linus distinct voices that perfectly reflect their different personalities.

The Bookshelf

A Portal

I have this habit of starting a ton of books, reading 10-20 pages, and then setting them aside. It’s no good or bad, just a pattern I’ve noticed. Often I’ll start a whole bunch of books at once, read a few pages of each one every day for a few days, and then stack them all on my coffee table and stare at them. I usually come back to them one at a time, over the next six months or so. These are the five currently hanging out in “really into them but not actively reading them” purgatory. Am I the only one who does this? I can still remember the bygone days when I only read one book at time.

A Bookish Quandary

This week I’m tackling the second half of this excellent question from Cassie:

How do you carve out time for baking? How do you make it a priority, and how do you choose what to make each week?

Despite a beautiful day of snowy baking last week, I’ve been struggling to find inspiration in the kitchen. When I’m deciding what to bake, I usually start with what I want to eat. Maybe I’m in the mood for a cake, or something with apples, or chocolate, or a salty, savory pastry. Then I browse through my cookbooks until a recipe jumps out at me.

What’s been happening recently, though, is that I find a recipe that sounds perfect—exactly what I want—and I read through it and think, “this is way too daunting,” and put the book back on my shelf. It happens even with simple recipes.

So I’ve started choosing bakes in a more practical way. I start with a different question: what feels manageable to me right now? That’s why I made these scones. I woke up in the morning feeling excited to bake, and this scone recipe felt doable. I wasn’t particularly craving apple scones (though they were delicious) but I knew I would enjoy making them, so I went for it. Sometimes I am a person who gets excited about ambitious baking projects—Cookie Extravaganza is coming up, after all. But a lot of the time I’m just a tired person who wants to eat treats. What I choose to bake depends on which one I am in any given moment.

Around the Internet

On Book Riot, I made a list of must-read audiobooks with Indigenous narrators.

Now Out / Can’t Wait!

Now Out

Fatty Fatty Boom Boom by Rabia Chaudry (Algonquin Books): This is a memoir about food, fatness, and Rabia Chaudry’s Pakistani immigrant family. Apparently there are recipes! It sounds great.

Can’t Wait

A Dash of Salt and Pepper by Kosoko Jackson (December 6th, Berkeley): I haven’t actually read Jackson’s debut romance, I’m So Not Over You, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be excited about his new one! I’m always on the lookout for more queer men writing romance, and this one is about food, so I’m in.

Bonus Recs: More Favorite Poetry from 2022

A few other collections that came out this year that I loved: The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On by Franny Choi, Beast at Every Threshold by Natalie Wee, Swollening by Jason Purcell, and The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón.

The Boost

• Transanta is a rad mutual aid organization that sends gifts to trans youth. It’s that time of year! You can check out the gift registries and buy gifts and/or donate here.

• Unionized Harper Collins workers are on strike. Here is some useful information about how to support the strike; you can donate to the strike fund here.

• Thanksgiving is a trash holiday. I shared this post last year and it’s still relevant. It’s easy to celebrate Thanksgiving because it’s a day many people have off work. It’s easy to say that we’re celebrating gratitude and family and that it’s just about good food and coming together. But Thanksgiving is a day that marks genocide and land left and colonization, no matter how you spin it. So it’s something I’m working to extricate myself from. Maybe you are, too.

As always, a little bit of beauty to send you on your way: It snowed, and my heart woke up.

Catch you next week, bookish friends!