Volume 4, No. 31: Ritual, Rhyme, Reckoning, Reverence

August Reading Reflections

Hi, book and treat people! It’s been a while! Thank you so much for sticking around as I reconfigure this newsletter in a way that works for me. It was so, so good for me to take some time this past month to reflect on what I love about it and what I don’t—without the pressure of writing it every week.

I have some ideas for a weekly newsletter that might feel like all fun and no work—but I’m going to let those percolate for a while. I’m not going to rush into anything. What a gift spaciousness is!

There’s actually quite a lot going on in my life right now—some big changes coming up!—but this newsletter is already extremely long, so I’m going to jump right into it. I expect September’s newsletter will be all about those changes. I’m so, so grateful to all of you for being here. I had a wildly rewarding reading month, given the world, given change, given how busy I’ve been, and I’m excited to tell you all about it.

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August is one of my least favorite months (my second-to-least-favorite, to be exact). It’s always hard. But I got through it, and, to my surprise, I got through it with a lot of joy! So today I’m sharing a collection of things, bookish and otherwise, that held and nourished and delighted me in August. Because so much of this month’s reading was about language and the sounds it makes, I’ve sorted the collection into categories that start with the letter ‘R’: rituals, rhymes, reckonings, reverences, reciprocities, rereadings, and revelings.

Ritual: Morning Tea & Poetry

Most of my reading in August was for the Sealey Challenge, and it was a total joy. I created a morning ritual that included reading poetry first thing in the morning, and not looking at my phone until after I’d read (at least a little bit) and gone for my swim.

My tea setup didn’t look like this every morning. Some mornings I got up late. But I kept up my no-phone-first-thing rule for the whole month, and it has added so much spaciousness to my days. September is going to be busy and different, but I’ll be carrying the texture of this ritual with me into the fall.

I posted a lot about the Sealey throughout the month; you can find all those posts here and also here. A few of my favorite new-to-me poetry collections include Deed by torrin a. greathouse (“But hasn’t language always led the mouth back to what fills it? Between the teeth, there’s a dozen paths to every meaning.”), The Black Maria by Aracelis Girmay (“I am marked by the dead, your sea-letters / of salt & weeping.”), and Customs by Somaz Sharif (“A poet as a fixed position // most cannot stand to be in / for long.”).

Rhyme: Picture Books

I read some absolutely INCREDIBLE picture books this month, some of the best I’ve read this year. A few of my favorites have something in common: rhyme. I love a rhyming picture book. There is almost nothing as purely & simply pleasurable as a good rhyming picture book. Here are three I am head-over-heels for.

The Book That Almost Rhymed by Omar Abed (words) & Hatem Aly (art) (2024)

Reading this book is perhaps one of the most purely pleasurable reading experiences I have ever had in my life. Yes, I was laughing, laughing so hard that I actually had to stop trying to eat my lunch while reading this so that I wouldn’t choke. Yes, I am still chuckling about it. It is extremely and perfectly funny. But what I love even more than its perfect wordplay humor is the pleasure of it. This is a book that embodies the pleasure of words and rhymes. Turning every page was a zing of pleasure. Every new stanza of this book/poem, every interruption, the expected and wonderful ending—a pleasure.

Bathe the Cat by Alice B. McGinty (words) & David Roberts (art) (2021)

Perfection. Rhyming? Yes. Repetition? Yes. A very sly and tricksy cat? Yes. The hilarious phrase, “Sarah, Bob the mat!”? YES. Charmingly bewildered family members? This also. A dinosaur costume because WHY NOT? Oh, yes. So many pink pants?! YES!

I cannot do it justice. I was laughing so hard. I mean just on the couch unable to stop laughing, my dog sitting on my feet wondering what the big deal was. I had to read a few pages twice because they were so funny I did not want to stop laughing. Yes please. 100/10, no notes.

Snippy and Snappy by Wanda Gág (1931)

This is an utterly charming story about Snippy and Snappy, two field mice who live with their parents in a cozy nook in a hay field. One day they chase their mom’s blue ball of yarn to a house, which is full of very strange things (like flat flowers that don’t smell like flowers, and trees with four trunks, and plants with roots above the ground). They’ve heard that houses have kitchen cupboards, and that kitchen cupboards are where cheese is kept, so they go looking for it. Well, that gets dangerous fast.

The rhyme and repetition is fantastic. So are the intricate black and white illustrations, which are often shaped like what they describe—one illustration of the mice chasing the ball of yarn over the hills is a long, curvy line across two pages. I also love the edge of darkness. At one point I actually had to flip to the end to make sure everything ended up okay. I mean, I knew it would, but Gág is very good at writing tension. She’s so good at it that I felt the danger and fear even though I knew how the story would end.

This is a book my aunt recommended, one she remembers reading from her childhood, and it’s such a delight to me that it holds up. I was riveted, amused, entertained, and felt an immense sense of contentment upon finishing.

Reverence: Mountains

I grew up hiking in the White Mountains and I don’t have the words for how much I love them. I finished climbing all the 4,000 footers in 2014, and, for reasons passing understanding (life, I guess?), I haven’t spent a night in the mountains since. A few weeks ago I hiked the Franconia Ridge with my brother, sister-in-law and nephews. We stayed at Greenleaf (the AMC huts are and will always be magic), and even though it was foggy and there was no view, even though my body hurt a lot, being up among those ancient and magnificent mountains was everything. I did not realize how much I missed them until I woke up in that high place and felt something in my body ease.

I brought two tiny chapbooks (both from Neon Hemlock Press) into the mountains with me and reading them in this place, watching the clouds roll over the ridge in the early morning, was one of the highlights of the Sealey.

I don’t know when I will get back up there, but I’m committed to making the mountains a priority again.

Rereading: Poetry

I decided to do 50/50 rereads and new-to-me-reads during this year’s Sealey. Rereading my favorite poetry had been even better than I imagined. I’m already planning more slow one-poem-a-day rereads of my most beloved collections. Meanwhile, here are a few rereads that shook me down to my core.

Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar

“Mostly I want to be letters.” Every time I opened this book it was Cyrus, yearning and breaking. And then it was Roya, ferocity and gentleness and wry faith. These poems spilled so far out of themselves and so far into me I lost track of who was speaking: Akbar the poet, Akbar the speaker of the poems, Cyrus, Roya, Orkideh, me the reader, all of us blurring and shapeshifting and made of each other, and what is a poem anyway, except a doorway through which we touch each other?

Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz

This is a water book and a river gift. This is a body book, a river body. I drank it up, swam though it, let its waters wash and wave me: the water, the river, the body of the beloved, her hips and thighs and eyes and skin. There are other things here: American violence, land-memory, police violence, grief, basketball, empire and its clawing hungers. But mostly this book is water, the Colorado River, the Mojave language—and the body that is all of these homes and beings, inseparable.

The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On by Franny Choi

Oh, this hurt. This is a big and beautiful book, a bursting book, these poems are gorgeous and grief-full and angry and here. They are about the ongoing everyday apocalypse of living in this world, the before and now and tomorrow of it, they are specific and intricate worlds, memories, maybes.

Reciprocity: Reading Devotions with Bookish Pals

One of the sweetest parts of this year’s Sealey was reading one Mary Oliver poem from Devotions every day. I asked on bookstagram if anyone would be interested in being part of an informal Devotions reading group, and one month later—what a gift. I loved sharing my thoughts and feelings about the poems, and hearing about everyone else’s experiences of them. I loved seeing annotations and listening to songs the poems made folks think of. I loved the way sharing in this experience made the poems richer and deeper. I loved it when we disagreed about them. I am so grateful for this little slip of a space and community.

Reveling: Weather

I used to love September but now it feels like a cruel trick. Maybe it used to be cooler in my childhood, or maybe I’ve outgrown the delusion. Either way, it’s a -ber month, and a back-to-school month, so emotionally it feels like fall. It is not fall. It is summer. I’m awaiting the return of 90 degree days with dread (I’m sure it will happen), and while I wait, I’m reveling in memories of the blissful stretch of cool days we had in August. I actually took my pup on long walks in the afternoons. It was 48 degrees at the lake in the mornings and the water held a delicious chill. I put on socks and baked a cake. It was heaven.

The cake I made is an almond plum cake from Yossy Arefi’s book Snacking Cakes. I added cardamom and sprinkled the top with cinnamon sugar. Heaven.

Ritual: Water

I have put my body of water into a body of water every day since May 20th. That’s 101 consecutive days of water. One of the (endless) gifts of this ritual is that I no longer think about it. Every day, I will swim. Most mornings I go to the lake. Sometimes I go to the river instead. If I sleep late and miss my morning swim, I go in the afternoon. I never make a choice. I wake up, I am alive, I will swim.

Here’s a photo from one of my favorite swims of the month. I woke up to pouring rain and rain in the forecast all day. My bed was cozy, but I drove to the river in the 6am dark and put my body in the water. It was cold. The rain made music. I am so lucky.

Another favorite swim of the month: I spent the night at my parents’ house in Eastern MA the day before I drove up to New Hampshire for my hike. I was meeting my family at the trailhead early, so, in order to make sure I got a swim in, I got up at 5am and drove to Walden. The sun hadn’t risen. I was the only one there. It was dark and still. I swam through that stillness and watched the sky lightening around me. I am so lucky.

Reverence: Language

I read so many books in August that expanded my understanding of what language can do. This is my favorite thing in the universe. This is what I’m thinking about all day every day: what language can do, what language can’t do. Here are three books that remake language in ways I will never be done untangling.

With My Back to the World by Victoria Chang

How is this book possible. How is a sentence like this a sentence a person can make: “Depression is vertical, always easy to brush through, knotless, silky.” Or this one: “Some of us spend our lives trying / to pin language to the sky but language is the one that gets to stay.”

One poem contains these two lines: “Every poem is trying to be the last free words on earth.” And: “Everything violent in the world can be made beautiful with language.” I don’t know what else to say about it, this crack at the center of us, this endless contradiction, language and the body and what happens when they meet.

A Theory of Birds by Zaina Alsous

My favorite poetry feels like a place language goes to remake itself. I’m thinking about sci-fi writers who talk about speculative fiction as a tool for imagining different worlds, as a place to go to wield their imaginations, to build things beyond what we know to be possible. I think poetry is that place for language. The best poets understand poetry as a place to do things with language beyond what we know to be possible. The things Alsous does with language are alchemical, botanical, geologic. She breaks syntax, builds new histories with tense, opens doors to infinite possibilities with the spaces she drills into lines, words, sentences, how they touch and do not touch each other.

Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky (reread)

This collection is a play in two acts about townspeople in an occupied country who use deafness, silence, a secret and invisible language, as resistance, as a tool for liberation. It is about the ways they fail each other and the ways they don’t. It is about witness and complacency and the absolutely incomprehensible fact of continuing to live, despite. I don’t know how to put this; it feels obscene to even try to write about this collection knowing what I know about what is happening, right now, in the world. Knowing what I know about the Palestinian people being murdered. Knowing what I know about who’s building the bombs. Knowing what I know the irreplaceable insides of lives I have never and will never meet. I can’t let go of the words but I can’t make them make sense, either. Kaminsky makes something with them, though. With words and silence, he makes something.

Reckoning: Morally Complex Fiction & Nonfiction

I didn’t read much that wasn’t poetry this month but here are two standouts:

Bad Gays by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller

This is a brilliant history that I have already decided I’m going to need to buy because I listened to it, and while the audiobook is great, I want to be able to take notes. It’s a series of profiles of “bad gays” from throughout history: people who did terrible things or were terrible people, sometimes in obvious ways and sometimes in more complex ways for complex reasons. They talk about several gay Nazis, Roy Cohn and J. Edgar Hoover, Lawrence of Arabia, Margaret Meade. The authors argue (brilliantly) that the project of male homosexuality as its been defined in the wet (which is quite new) is inextricably linked to colonialism, and white supremacy. In profiling these various figures they show, over and over again, how white gay men (and some women) have not always been in opposition to the state, but have worked for the state—sometimes not in spite of, but because of, their homosexuality.

It’s very smart and made me think a lot about who we claim as ancestors. If we pretend queer history is only the history of radical revolutionaries fighting the state, and not also the history of gay fascists working to uphold the state, how will we ever change? The authors argue that western homosexuality has failed, and that we need something new—an understanding of queerness that is not tied to binary categories, that is not interested in power and proximity to whiteness, that is not just a remix of the same old power structures.

Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan

This is an incredible work of historical fiction set in the 1980s during the early years of the Sri Lankan civil war. It’s about Sashi, a young Tamil medical student who is fierce and smart and courageous and just wants to live her life with the people she loves. She just wants to practice medicine, to heal anyone who needs healing. And she’s forced to make impossible choice after impossible choice. There is so much to say about this book, but the one thing that kept breaking me, over and over, is how every system in this novel, every organization, fails the people. The Sri Lankan government is murderous, racist, evil. The Tamil Tigers murder and disappear Tamil people who disagree with the movement’s dogma. The Indian Army arrives as a “peacekeeping force” and the soldiers violently rape Tamil women. The UN looks on in silence as if Tamil lives do not matter. Are expendable. Does this sound familiar.

These governments and organizations are not the same. There is no equivalency—none—between the Tigers and the Sri Lankan government. And yet they both fail the people. I don’t know what to do with this horrifying truth, but I’ll be thinking about this book for a long time.

Rereading: Circe

I reread Circe by Madeline Miller annually every December, but after rereading The Song of Achilles on a whim in July, I decided I couldn’t wait that long. There’s no rule saying I can’t read a book twice in one year!

The thing about Circe is that it is so much a part of me it feels hard to write about. There’s a particular moment, about an hour before the end (I love the audiobook), when I start sobbing and I cannot stop. It doesn’t matter what kind of mood I’m in, what’s going on in my life or the world. No matter what, I weep through the last hour of Circe. Reading it is like lancing a wound; the book draws the poison out. After I finish it, I feel clear. Not better, just clearer. The feeling is: Okay. Here we are. Here we are in the tide, weeping and trying. Okay. I feel so grateful for it.

Reveling: Picture Books

In addition to amazing picture books that rhyme, I read some amazing picture books that don’t rhyme! All three of these books are low on words and high on perfect. I love them all so much it’s hard to know what to do with myself.

Freight Train by Donald Crews (1978)

Well, this is a joy of a book. A rainbow freight train zooms down the tracks. That’s it. There are almost no words. The pictures are perfect. I read it twice. I was delighted. The whir of the train in motion! The train in the tunnel! The train going, going, gone. The colorful train against varied backgrounds. I adored it.

This is one of the reasons I have fallen head over heels for picture books. They invite me into moments. This book is not a story, it’s not deep, it’s literally just some pictures about a freight train. I can see why it might delight children, but I KNOW why it delighted me: a little slip of time. Just to be with the train and the colors and the ink on the page and the big bold words describing what was happening. Nothing major, nothing important, just a thing in the world, being itself.

We All Play by Julie Flett (2021)

Oh my heart, what a perfect book. I love love love Julie Flett’s work, and I plan to read through all of it. This is not the most powerful of her books, not the deepest or the most subtle. It is wonderfully simple and perfectly executed. It’s basically a long poem with a repeating structure. “Animals hide and hop,” it begins, and goes on, describing what different animals do: sniff and sneak, peek and peep. Each of these wonderful runs of animal activity ends with the line “We play too!” in English and Cree, with an illustration of kids playing. Then it repeats.

I really can’t explain how much I love this. The art is so beautiful. The animals are so expressive, so themselves. There is something about the gentleness and simplicity of it that sings. Here are animals living, and we do the same thing, Flett says. Nothing fancy. Just creatures of all kinds, playing.

There’s a wonderful author’s note at the end where Flett talks about how her dad taught her a lot about animals and the earth and their relationships to these non-human things when she was a kid. What’s amazing is that all of that is in the book, even though there are so few words, even though none of it is explained directly. It’s just there, in the fabric of the story.

Bunny Days by Tao Nyeu

This book is utterly perfect. Where do I start? How do I explain? Is it even possible? This book includes three absurd stories about bunnies that get into sticky situations with the goats they…share nature with, I guess?

Okay, so here is the plot of the first story: Mr. Goat is driving along on his tractor and splashes the bunnies with mud, and they get very dirty! Oh no! Don’t worry, it’s okay, because their neighbor Bear, who’s just sitting in a field knitting, NEXT TO A WASHING MACHINE, tosses them in on the delicate cycle. All clean, problem solved.

I cannot explain how delightful this book is. Everything about it is perfect. I’m not going to tell you the plots of the other two stories because they are TOO SILLY AND PERFECT. The imagination, and whimsy is unmatched. I was giggling nonstop and my dog was looking at me funny. Who makes books like this!? I am so grateful that silly beautiful, absurd, creative art like this exists and that I can hold it in my hands and laugh about it. What a gift.

Reverence: Ashfield Lake

August 11th marked my one year anniversary with Ashfield Lake. On August 11, 2023, I went there for the first time. It’s hard for me to fathom my life without it now. Some days it is bright and clear and sharp,

and some days it is misty and grey. No matter what,

it holds me. On August 11th, I threw myself a little anniversary celebration after my swim. It was a perfect August morning, a hint of fall in the air. The light was clear and bright. I feel so lucky to be in relationship with this beloved body of water.

Reciprocity: The Green & Growing World

This summer I participated in Herbal Listening School at Foxtrot Farm, hosted by the wonderful herbalists and farmers of Foxtrot and MIXED GREENS. This past Sunday we worked with elderberry. We walked through Foxtrot’s elderberry orchard, and I drafted a poem inspired by elder’s deep purple berries (and its name). I am going to carry the spirit of play, expansiveness, creativity, and curiosity of Herbal Listening School with me into the fall.

I spent a lot of time at my community garden plot, harvesting flowers and saying thank you to butterflies.

Thanks for reading, bookish friends. If you have anything to share about your month, bookish or otherwise, any reverences, rituals, rhymes, rereads, reciprocities, reckonings—or something that is not an R-word!—please come hang out in the comments. Otherwise, I’ll catch you at the end of September.