Volume 4, No. 22: Watery Glimmers, a 43-Year-Old Picture Book, & Dionne Brand

May Reading Reflections

Greetings, book and treat people! It’s June, which means it’s Pride Month, which is not really a thing I care about, but also: Happy Pride as in Free Palestine! I’m struggling with words, but these ones helped me. I’m really excited about this! I won’t be able to attend every session, but I’m planning to go to a few—Valley people, maybe I’ll see some of you there?

This whole experiment I’m in the midst of—asking folks to pay money for this newsletter—has been more emotional than I anticipated. So far, it hasn’t gone as I’d hoped, which is often what happens when you take a risk. That’s why risks are scary. I know this is a basic thing to say, but wow, when you feel it, you feel it, you know?

If you have subscribed—thank you, thank you, thank you. If you have pledged to become a paying subscriber when I switch over to Ghost—thank you, thank you, thank you. If you have sent me a message of support or reached out to let me know how much my writing means to you—thank you, thank you, thank you. I’ve read and savored every word.

If a quarter of the people reading these words subscribe, right now, at $5/month, I’ll meet my goal. I’ve realized over the past few weeks just how much I love writing this newsletter, and how sad I’ll be if I can’t keep doing so. Unfortunately, neither loving this work nor being sad pays the bills. Every $5 means the world to me.

Some updates about the continuing transition process:

• This is the last free newsletter you’ll receive. Starting next week, Books & Bakes will be for paying subscribers only. I truly wish I’d been able to meet my goal and keep it un-paywalled, and I’m sorry that I couldn’t. Endless gratitude to everyone who subscribed and/or pledged over the past month—your belief in a donation-based but sustainable subscription model means everything to me.

• I’ve decided to keep the Bookshop giveaway open for another week! Subscribe, or fill out the pledge form, by Tuesday June 11th, and you’ll automatically be entered in a raffle to win a $30 gift card to Bookshop.org. I’ll contact the two winners on June 12th.

• If I meet my goal and am able to continue writing the newsletter, I will be switching over to Ghost. If you want to wait to pay until I’ve switched platforms, you can pledge your support here. If you’ve already done so, or if you do so by next Tuesday, I’ll comp you a subscription to ensure you continue receiving the newsletters until I switch.

Onward to books!

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I love writing monthly reading reflections. It’s good to think about what’s been sweet and hard, in reading and in life. But I don’t always feel like writing about every book I read in chronological order, so I’m always looking for new ways to write month-in-review posts.

Today I’m taking inspiration from one of the most beautiful words that can appear under the title of a poem: after. I get shivers when I see ‘after’ in poems. It’s miraculous. It’s how a poet signals that a particular poem is directly indebted to, in conversation with, and inspired by another poet. This newsletter is after my friend

Rosamond

. I stole the structure (entirely and completely!) from the month-in-review posts she does, because I love them. If you’re not already subscribed to her newsletter, go fix that, and check out her May in Review post while you’re at it. (Did we share a favorite book in May? WE SURE DID!)

Favorite Reads

Another Word for Love by Carvell Wallace

Traci Thomas

told me to read this book immediately and then Rosamond (see above!) told me the same thing, so I read it and I loved it and now I am telling you to read it, too. It is a beautiful and earnest queer love song about surviving, about choosing to survive. About loving long and truly, which means loving brokenly. About how healing is collective, is deeply intertwined with collective liberation, is not something that happens in isolation. It is about music and cooking and sex and parenting and making beautiful art and how all of those things, all of those places and people and moments and ideas, are what has kept Wallace alive, over and over again.

There’s a chapter on causing harm, making amends, and the failure of frameworks of apology that I have not stopped thinking about since I read it, not for one moment.

They read the audiobook and it’s gorgeous, full of passages that feel like prose poetry, that fly.

A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib

Do I have a literary crush on Hanif Abdurraqib? I sure do. His brain and his heart and his earnestness and the way he speaks and sings about the things he loves. His brilliance and his humor and how he sees the world and the ways he challenges all of us to look closely, closer, even closer. The way his words hurt me and give me hope. Also, his dog.

Anyway, after falling completely head-over-heels for There’s Always This Year, I decided it was time to address the glaring problem that I have not yet read every word he’s ever published. If you haven’t read this masterpiece, it’s time, but here are a few more (inadequate) words in case you need or want them.

The subtitle, Notes in Praise of Black Performance, captures the heart of this book. It’s a collection of odes to Black performance. Abdurraqib moves through history, exalting and interrogating so many different kinds of performance: music, of course, but also dance, play, grief, language, poetry, magic. He is curious about how Black people have survived the hellscape of America, but also—more—how Black people come home, love, celebrate, make worlds. His understanding of performance is vast and gorgeous. It encompasses code-switching as a kind of revelry, and playing pickup basketball, and not knowing how to speak through grief. It includes the heartbeat of Black punk, and Black magicians in the 1920s, and playing spades, and Aretha Franklin’s funeral. Performance as riot, as love language, as mask, as protest, as refuge, as despair, as home.

One Bright Glimmer

I took my first swim of the season in my beloved Ashfield Lake on May 7th. Since May 20th, I have put my body into a body of water every single day. That’s 17 consecutive days and it’s only June 5th. When I drove to the lake on a cold rainy Saturday and went for a long swim, because I could not imagine a day without being in water, I knew I’d set sail on a ship that I won’t step off of until…November? (I have a wetsuit now.)

Every time I dive into the water and swim far out into the middle of all that blue, it’s a glimmer. But there’s also the knowledge—another kind of glimmer—that I am going to swim every day for the next five months at least. Every. Single. Day. I am going to do this because it is the thing that makes me feel the most alive, the most joyful, the most at home in my body. Being in water sets me free. I have the power to set myself free, for a little while, every day. I am going to use that power. I am making a commitment to myself. It feels fucking incredible.

Last Friday, I met my bestie for a long swim, and afterwards we had dinner at The Ashfield Lake House to celebrate her birthday. Everyone raves about this spot but I had never been and now I have and it’s magic. Want to meet up there this summer? Say the word.

Book I’m Looking Forward To

El Ghourabaa edited by Samia Marshy and Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch

You may have heard me shouting about how much I love Metonymy Press. They are for real the best. I cannot wait for this anthology of Arab and Arabophone queer writing. It sounds weird and lush and genre-exploding and gorgeously queer in structure and style. It’ll be out in June and you can preorder it here.

Biggest Surprise

I’m still reading a picture book every day, and even though I know just how good they can be and just how deeply they can move me—even still, sometimes I read one and my love for it stuns me. That’s what happened with Do Not Open by Brinton Turkle. It was published in 1981, which, at 43 years, makes it older than me. I really cannot explain how much I love it. What a gift, to be surprised like this! To experience wonder like this!

Buckle up, because I have a new favorite lesbian in fiction. I am besotted. Do I want to be her or do I want to live with her and her cat Captain Kidd in a house by the sea? Maybe both. I suppose this is what people call a “queer-coded” book, which I find hilarious and sort of silly, because it’s just so obvious. Miss Moody is a big dyke. Throw her a party.

Anyway, this book is a joy, start to finish, an absolute delight. Miss Moody and her cat live by the sea. Miss Moody’s favorite thing is to collect treasure that washes up on the beach after a storm. Her house is filled with this treasure, including the “handsome banjo clock” that sits on her mantle. Do people who aren’t lesbians own handsome banjo clocks? Unclear. Anyway, after a really big storm she finds a bottle marked with the words DO NOT OPEN, which, hahaha, Miss Moody ignores that and oh wow, a whole lot happens when she opens the bottle.

It’s so good! She’s so clever! And also: CAPTAIN KIDD IS THE STAR OF THE SHOW! I laughed so hard at the end of this book. It’s so perfect. It’s whimsical and delicious and did I mention that Miss Moody lives in a house built by a sea captain but there are no men anywhere in sight and she goes everywhere in these very practical tall boots and flannel shirt and also! that her hat has a flower on its brim because LESBIANS CONTAIN MULTITUDES. Am I getting overexcited? I just felt so deeply drawn to this character. Everything about the way she moves through the world is familiar and dear.

My friend

Sarah Miller

recommended this one to me. Have I mentioned how great she is?

I’m Still Learning

My reading this year has been dancing all over the place, but two yearlong (lifelong?) projects have emerged, and both of them took off in May.

The first is my slow read of Dionne Brand’s Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems. I know I’ve mentioned this before. I only read it once a week, which, it turns out, is the key to successful slow reading for me. Reading a few pages a day of a long book doesn’t work—I get too overwhelmed and distracted. But setting aside 1-2 hours every weekend to read a particular book: perfection.

I am learning so much from this amazing book of poems: about language and how to wield it. About rhythm and music and dreaming. About Caribbean lit and Black Canadian lit and resistance as world-building and Black liberation movements and hope as a practice and bodies of work and and and.

One of the best parts of this whole experience is all the supplemental texts I’m reading. I made a long list of artists and poets who’ve influenced Dionne Brand (taken from Christina Sharpe’s introduction), and I’ve been slowly working my way through some of their books. In May I read Poems of Resistance from British Guyana by Martin Carter and Color by Countee Cullen. Martin Carter, especially, blew me away.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of listening to a conversation between poets Tamiko Beyer, Franny Choi, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs about the intersections of poetry and social justice. It was so nourishing and expansive. Gumbs spoke about poetry as an ethical process, a practice of dreaming, a “practice of resonance.” At one point she put it like this: “Language as a possible attunement that we could imagine otherwise.”

In the introduction to Nomenclature, Christina Sharpe writes: “Brand counted herself lucky to have come of age during a time when poetry was seen as essential to making new worlds. ‘I wanted,’ she said, ‘to show the utter joy of collective political resistance, the way in which its marvelous aspect is also an aesthetic pleasure. I wanted to show that liberation was political thought, and liberation is aesthetic power.’”

I am thinking about this line from Brand’s long poem ‘Nomenclature for the Time Being’: “What is it to talk as if the world you know is the world”

And I’m thinking of this line from Martin Carter’s poem ‘I Am No Soldier’: “I am this poem like a sacrifice.” Poems of Resistanc is about material revolution. It’s about the world-work of overthrowing a colonial government. It’s also about what it means to be a poet doing the world-work of making resistance art. I’m thinking about these two things, which sometimes feel in opposition to each other, and about Carter’s influence on Brand (he’s only one of many revolutionary artists named in Sharpe’s introduction).

I don’t know what it means to be a “poem like a sacrifice” but I think Carter is getting at the connections between selfhood and art and resistance. I think he’s talking about the same thing Gumbs was talking about, the same thing Brand is talking about, the thing Franny Choi was talking about the other night when they named “the slipperiness of poetry” as part of its emotional power.

What is my responsibility as a reader and holder of words? When I read the work of someone like Martin Carter, when I think about all the ways Guyana is still not free, and the different ways Palestine is not free, and the still different ways none of us are free, here in this world bombarded and broken by empire—what kind of sacred contract am I entering into?

And what is my responsibility as a becoming-poet, as someone concerned with the building of worlds? I believe that the work of imagining otherwise belongs to all of us. I am becoming more and more resistant to narrative, which capitalism so easily twists into violence. The other night Gumbs spoke about poetry as “a departure from narrative form.” I think this is where its world-building, otherwise-imagining power lies. I’m trying to live it. Always imperfectly.

All of this to say: my brain is alive and buzzing, my heart is alive and beating.

The second project is what I’m calling my Year of Mary (inspired by one of my favorite people on Bookstagram, Cee, who does an author project like this every year).

I read two Mary Oliver books in May: Red Bird and Thirst. I first read Thirst in 2017 and didn’t especially like it. It came out the year after the death of Oliver’s partner, Molly Malone Cook. It is extremely religious. The poems are about grief and about God. The first time I read it the God poems startled me. I do not believe in or care for the God of this book, and seven years ago, I found it jarring to read so many poems about God’s love, God’s grace. I am so glad I read it again because this time I adored it.

Well, it broke me. It is so raw. It is the most vulnerable book of hers I’ve read so far. The grief, at times, felt like it would swallow me. And yet. I love the God poems especially, not just for their beauty, their truth, their articulation of a rending and transcendent experience, but because they feel so deeply striving, so deeply human. The God in these poems, like the fields and the herons, seems to be another way Oliver is trying to survive grief, survive the broken world. Another way she turns to love. Another way to look.

4.
How many mysteries have you seen in your 
      lifetime? How many nets pulled
full over the boat's side, each silver body
      ready or not falling into 
submission? How many roses in early summer
      uncurling above the pale sands then
falling back in unfathomable
      willingness? And what can you say? Glory
to the rose and the leaf, to the seed, to the
     silver fish Glory to time and the wild fields,
and to joy. And to grief's shock and torpor, its near swoon.

5.
So it is not hard to understand 
      where God's body is, it is
everywhere and everything; shore and the vast 
      fields of water, the accidental and the intended
over here, over there.

All of this to say: I am learning Mary Oliver anew every day.

This newsletter would not be after Rosamond without any doggos, so here’s my pup on a happy May walk.

Catch you next week, bookish friends!