Volume 4, No. 9: Walking Around Making Poems

February Reading Reflections

Greetings, book and treat people! February felt like a weird reading month for me, but I read 21 books. I’m still writing a poem every day, and reading a picture book every day. I’m still crying a lot and walking around in a dizzying mix of profound sadness and simmering rage. I’m not ready for spring, but I’m working on sprouting, anyway: sending tendrils out into the world, finding ways to connect, to act, to be braver and softer.

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February began with a beautiful snowstorm.

I started off the month with some brilliant queer nonfiction: When Brooklyn Was Queer by Hugh Ryan. His thoughtful, nuanced, expansive approach to history has made me an instant fan.

I listened to The Bluest Eye on audio as part of the yearlong Toni Morrison readalong Scott is hosting on Instagram. I learned that I cannot read Morrison on audio: it’s too dense and requires too much of my attention. I also realized that reading all of her fiction in one year is too much for me. Instead of rushing ahead to Sula, I’m going to reread The Bluest Eye in print, maybe in April. Slowing down is always a good idea.

There was, as always, much snuggling (and bed-hogging).

As always, Nessa and I took many dazzling walks on the ridge.

I enjoyed Diriye Osman’s short story collection Fairytales for Lost Children, though not as much as The Butterfly Jungle. The stories are about queer Somali characters both at home and in disapora.

I bought NANGAMAY Dream MANA Gather DJURALI, a collection of LGBTQIA+ First Nations poetry, as part of my birthday order from Readings Bookshop in Australia. Sadly I didn’t love it, but I’m glad I read it.

One evening, I watched the sun set behind an old sugarshack. I thought about how much I love this place. (It’s a sugarshack in my own personal mythology; realistically it’s just an outbuilding.)

Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark rewired my brain. Only 100 pages, but they might be the most world-opening 100 pages I’ve ever read. I can’t wait to reread it.

Stars in Their Eyes by Jessica Walton and Aska is an adorable graphic novel about a disabled girl at her first big fan convention who forms a sweet connection with a nonbinary volunteer. I loved it! It’s charming and sweet and real and made me smile.

In Leg, Greg Marshall writes about his chaotic childhood in a big family with a mom who was always dying of cancer. His parents hid the fact that he had cerebral palsy from him—he grew up thinking he had “tight tendons”. I had mixed feelings about this that I’m still untangling. I did appreciate the way it made me think about how we talk about disability vs. how we talk about illness (even though they are deeply intwined).

In the mornings, we walked along the road and reveled in the light.

In the evenings, we did the same thing.

My people, I read Cat Sebastian’s upcoming midcentury baseball romance, You Should Be So Lucky, and, like, what am I supposed to do now? Could I read queer historical baseball romances forever and ever and never tire of them? I could. More please.

I finished Hala Alyan’s collection The Twenty-Ninth Year and Kaveh Akbar’s first chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic on the same day. They are both brilliant and full of life and cut me open and made me cry.

They Called Me a Lioness by Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi also cut me open and made me cry. It’s a harrowing book about her arrest and detention and the ongoing, horrifying realties of the occupation. What has stayed with me, though, is the depth and ferocity of Tamimi’s love for her people and her home.

I reread Anne of Green Gables on audio! It’s a very queer book! It’s a very earnest book! Anne can literally not shut up about how much she loves the world. She is so over-the-top dramatic about it and she’s not sorry. There’s only one appropriate response to the wonder she feels every day, and that is to shout about it endlessly. She’s basically me. I adore her. I’m working on a little thesis about queer earnestness and this book is going in it.

All the Names Given by Raymond Antrobus: another brilliant poetry collection.

I bought So Many Ways to Draw a Ghost by Chelsea Granger last year and I’m so glad I finally read it. It’s a beautiful self-published book about grief and death and the work of grief and death. There are journal entries, essays, poems, photos, collages, paintings, lists, recipes, and doodles. It’s about deeply intimate loss, but it also made me think a lot about collective and public grief and the space we don’t make for it.

The Lost Arabs by Omar Sakr absolutely destroyed me. These poems moved me so deeply and hurt so much. Sakr writes about being Arab in Australia and the US, about the violence perpetrated against his people, about what it feels like to be severed from home, about Islamophobia and family and diaspora and queerness and the desire to be both legible and illegible. Gorgeous and gutting.

Over February break, I got to go on the most incredible vacation with my family and my best friend.

I didn’t read much while I was away, but I listened to two audiobooks on the plane.

Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly was probably my favorite audiobook of the month and an all around perfect novel, honestly. It’s about two queer Maori Russian siblings and their sprawling, chaotic, dysfunctional, deeply loving family. I could have read two hundred more pages about these messy people and their messy, trying-their-best lives. It’s so funny and so wise and it’s also one of the warmest books I’ve read in ages. It made me feel a little less hopeless and a little less alone.

Small Fires by Rebecca May Johnson is the nonfiction cooking book of my dreams. I devoured it on audio and now I’m determined to get a print copy so I can revisit it. The way Johnson completely upends recipes and what they are: brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. I’m now thinking about recipes as sites of protest and refusal, as epics, as art, as translations, as play. If you are at all interested in food or cooking, you’re going to want to read this book.

When I got back, most of the snow had melted.

I gave Nessa a hundred kisses and a hundred more.

I listened to the YA anthology Poemhood: Our Black Revival, edited by Amber McBride, Erica Martin, and Taylor Byas, for a review. I really enjoyed the mix of classic and contemporary Black poets, and I appreciated the “outros” that offer historical context or give some insight into the poet’s inspiration and writing process. It’s a thoughtfully curated anthology, and I hope it finds its way to the teens it’s meant for.

A friend sent me a sweet package, with a new sticker for my planner.

I hardly read at all during my trip, and I haven’t been reading much since I got back. The only thing my brain seems to want these days is comfort romance rereads on audio, and guess what—I’m giving it what it wants. I closed out the month with Any Old Diamonds by KJ Charles and We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian, two books I will never get tired of rereading.

And then, a Leap Day miracle! I hadn’t opened a physical book in almost two weeks, and my review of the upcoming novel Bad Habit by Spanish writer Alana S. Portero (and translated Mara Faye Lethem) was overdue. So I read the whole thing in two sittings on February 29th and it was my favorite book of the whole month! It’s a coming-of-age novel about a trans girl living in a working-class neighborhood in Madrid in the 1980s and 1990s. It’s funny, biting, raw, wise, tender, sharp. It’s brilliant in about fifty different ways. It’s about trans sisterhood and mentorship and family and what it takes to survive. It’s painful but celebratory. I loved everything about it and a longer review is in the works. For now: preorder! It’s out in April.

February ended with a beautiful misty walk.

March began with a soul-filling night of poetry and activism, organized by the new Poet Laureate of Northampton, Franny Choi!

Here’s to a sweet, slow spring (but a little more winter first).