Volume 5, No. 1: What Fills Me Up

January Reading Reflections

Greetings, book people, treat people, tired people, trying people, sacred people, hoping people, people who are here. It has been a long time since the last newsletter I sent out on December 23rd. I kept thinking I’d send a newsletter before now, and each time the prospect felt too daunting. I’ve been reading a lot! Despite the state of the world (very bad), my January reading has been incredible. I’ve also been feeling a lot, thinking a lot, making plans, reaching out, reaching in, sleeping, crying, working, trying to feed myself. Trying to make a newsletter amid all of that seemed impossible. There is nothing to say, there is too much to say.

First, a housekeeping note. I had hoped to move this newsletter to a new platform in 2025 but that is not going to happen. I did a trial of Ghost last fall, and while I like a lot of things about it, I don’t have the bandwidth to move all the archives over. I’ve considered starting fresh somewhere else, but that doesn’t feel right either. I can only do what I can do and switching newsletter platforms is on the “can’t do it” list for now.

I still plan to send out monthly newsletters, but I don’t know what they’ll look like. Last year I said that I was going to “treat this newsletter more like a container for creativity and joy and less like work,” and I’m going to try to hold close to that.

This past Sunday, several friends came over to my house for an inaugural book club meeting. It might surprise some of you to learn that I have never been part of an in-person book club before. A friend and I decided that we wanted to start one, picked a book (Upstream by Mary Oliver), and invited a few people. On Sunday we sat around my living room and talked about making a good life, making art, writing poems, how judgmental Mary Oliver can be, Provincetown, being in relationship with creatures, being a part of natural cycles, a thousand other things. We talked and laughed and drank ginger tea and ate gooey cheese on bread and it filled me like nothing else this year has.

I don’t have any big or wise words today. I don’t have any resources to share. The times are very scary and what we do and say matters. How we show up for each other matters. One of the ways I am showing up this year is at book club. It is a small way. One thing I know is that when I feel full, I can pour that feeling out and into others. When I am full it is easier to reach out into the world.

I hope you’re holding onto the moments and people and words and piece of art that fill you up. I hope you’re looking for them, reaching toward them, even when it’s hard. That’s going to be my 20025 mantra: eagerly and earnestly reaching toward what fills me up.

A whole lot of books filled me up in January, but before we get into that, here are a few other things that filled me up in unexpected and nourishing ways:

• This incredible album by Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, which I learned about thanks to my friend

  Elisabeth Plumlee-Watson
  . I have been listening to it nonstop for the past three days. It has changed me. It has changed my capacity for beauty.

• This conversation on The Stacks that

  Traci Thomas
  had with Saeed Jones about Toni Morrison’s lecture on goodness.

• This album by Joy Oladokun, recommended to me by my friend Charlott.

• And: sweet texts from friends, my favorite tree, butterflies, snow.

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So many books filled me up in January. These are the ones that filled me up the most. I know these reviews seem long, but they are actually only snippets of what I’ve written. Are you interested in reading the full reviews? Would you be into it if I sent out weekly newsletters containing a single review? I truly want to know!

Lauren Soly, Tove and the Island with No Address (2024)

I adore Tove Jansson so I was delighted when a friend recommended this picture book inspired by her life and work. It’s set on a small, remote island off the coast of Finland, like the one Tove spent her summers on. The story follows Tove as a small girl on an adventure on a rainy morning before breakfast. She goes up before the sun is even out to visit her secret friend, a Moomin-like creature who lives in a sea grotto raising his five extremely wild daughters.

Perhaps my favorite thing about the whole book is that it happens before breakfast, and when Tove finally arrives back at the cabin to a big stack of pancakes which she eats by lamplight, she says: “Imagine never getting soaked to the bone and then getting dry again. How dreadful!”

A girl after my own heart. Me, a woman after Tove’s own heart. I cherish her work and am so grateful her spirit lives on in me when I go careening along beaches in the rain.

Sarah Leavitt, Something, Not Nothing (2024)

What does grief taste like? What shape is it? Where does it hide? What does it like to eat? What does it sound like when it cries, and can you draw it, and if not, can you speak it, and if not, then what? Does grief have a shadow? What happens when grief meets time? Does one of them die? How many questions can a body hold before it bursts? What do tears build? What tears grief?

It’s hard for me to write about this book, which I cried straight through. I started crying on page 9 or 10, and I did not stop crying until I put the book down. It’s a memoir about the death of Leavitt’s partner of 22 years, Donimo, although memoir isn’t the right word, memoir is too small. Leavitt wrote this series of comics in the two years after Donimo’s death. I don’t know how to explain them. They are visual poems, grief wells, shades and shadows and murmurings of loss and love.

Billy-Ray Belcourt, Coexistence (2024)

This collection of stories is pulsing, clattering, breathing with aliveness. Every story in it is singular, potent, a beautiful and specific expression of Indigenous love. Rarely a day goes by I don’t think about these stories, their shimmering ferocity, their smallness, which expands and expands into infinity.

Billy-Ray Belcourt writes theory into fiction like his life depends on it. He takes the world so seriously, and he also belly laughs. He takes theory out of the academy, shows us its bloody heart, its steaming insides, all its ugly, thorny contradictions. He makes theory live and change. His characters—mostly queer Cree men who are poets, artists, and professors—use theory as a way to remake language. They wrestle with it as they wrestle with the material realities of their world.

Mark Hyatt, Love, Leda (2023)

This is a “forgotten” novel, written in the 1960s (probably 1965), and not published until 2023. Mark Hyatt was a queer poet who was mostly published posthumously; his work appeared in several anthologies, as well as three chapbooks, all of which came out in the 1970s and 80s, after his death by suicide in 1972. This manuscript, however, was not discovered until the 2020s.

It’s a short, urgent, feisty, horny, poignant, funny romp of a novel about a 20-year old working-class gay man, Leda, who wanders around London (and occasionally the surrounding countryside), flitting among men, flats, jobs, clubs, bars, streets. The whole book takes places over the course of a week or so, although it’s hard to tell, because day blurs into night and into day again. Leda is wildly alive—he is by turns cocky, flirty, and flippant, and then falls into bouts of deep loneliness, sorrow, and cynicism.

There’s a dark immediacy to this novel: Where will Leda sleep? Where will his next meal come from? But it’s also philosophical and emotional, full of Leda’s reflections on his many fraught relationships. There are the older men and women he sleeps with, often in exchange for food, money, a place to sleep. There’s the straight married man he’s in love with. There’s his estranged family. Perhaps the most poignant scene in the whole book is also the longest: he spends a day at the seaside with the young children of a divorced woman who sometimes helps Leda out. The novel, like Leda, refuses to adhere to any expected narrative. Leda is not consumed by shame over being gay, but he’s not exactly happy, either. He is young, alone, angry, carefree, hurt, irresponsible, struggling, exhausted, contemplative.

Ariana Brown, We Are Owed. (2021)

This collection of stories is pulsing, clattering, breathing with aliveness. Every story in it is singular, potent, a beautiful and specific expression of Indigenous love. Rarely a day goes by I don’t think about these stories, their shimmering ferocity, their smallness, which expands and expands into infinity.

Billy-Ray Belcourt writes theory into fiction like his life depends on it. He takes the world so seriously, and he also belly laughs. The thing he does with theory is astounding to me. He takes it out of the academy, shows us its bloody heart, its steaming insides, all its ugly, thorny contradictions. He makes theory live and change. His characters—mostly queer Cree men who are poets, artists, and professors, use theory, study, scholarship, as a way to remake language, remake the world. They wrestle with it as they wrestle with the material realities of their world.

Frog and Toad Are Friends (1970)

What can I say about this tender, joyful, gay perfection? Is this the best book I’ve ever read about friendship? I adore the way Frog and Toad just love each other so openly and earnestly and fully! When Frog isn’t feeling while, Toad says, okay, hop in my bed and I’ll bring you tea! These stories are hilarious and silly and tender and they are also a model of deep care. They are full of so many small moments of care, moments that feel huge because there is so much love behind them.

Frog and Toad Together (1971)

Something I adore about these stories: Frog and Toad spend so much time sitting with their feelings. In ‘Dragons and Giants’ they wonder if they are brave, so they go off to have some adventures, and at the end, back home, Toad safely in bed and Frog safely in the closet (no scary dangers!) they just hang out there, feeling brave together. And in ‘The List’ when Toad’s list blows away and he feels unmoored, unable to go about the rest of his day, Frog doesn’t say, “okay, let’s. fix it, this is not a big deal, you can live without the list.” Instead he just sits down next to Toad on a hill and they feel their feelings.

Frog and Toad All Year (1976)

Some things I love about Toad include:

• How much he loves being in bed.

• His tendency to say “blah” when he’s sad or upset about anything.

• His willingness to be lured by Frog to try new things.

• His habit of announcing that, now that he has tried the new thing, he will go home to bed (the best place to be).

Every story in this book is perfect.

Days With Frog and Toad (1979)

In the last story in this volume, ‘Alone’, Toad arrives at Frog’s house to find a note tacked to the door, saying that Frog is out and he wants to be alone. Toad starts to worry that he has done something to upset Frog, and hurries to prepare a nice picnic to bring to Frog, who is sitting by himself on an island in the middle of the river. When he finally gets there, after many mishaps, distraught, and explains to Frog how upset he’s been, Frog says: “But Toad, I am happy. I am very happy. This morning when I woke up I felt good because the sun was shining. I felt good because I was a frog. And I felt good because I have you for a friend. I wanted to be alone. I wanted to think about how fine everything is.”

Toad, as he so often does about something Frog says or does, says, “Oh. I guess that is a very good reason for wanting to be alone.” And then they sit down to be alone together on the little island. I have nothing to add.

Marjane Satrapi, tr. Una Dimitrijevic, Woman, Life, Freedom (2023)

This is an incredible anthology of comics about the Woman! Life! Freedom! in Iran, as well as some (very broad and basic) Iranian history. The contributors are mostly Iranian, from both in Iran and the diaspora, though some of the comics are also written by a French professor and reporter with a deep knowledge of Iran.

There is a lot in this book that is very bleak. Over and over again the comic artists and writers of ask the reader to confront corruption, state violence, torture, repression, choking misogyny, seemingly-endless horrors. How can we live in a world like this? I found myself thinking, as I turned the pages, about the ways the horrors described here—though specific—are repeated, in different guises, in so many places across the world. This is the world we live in. And the people in this book—the writers and those they celebrate, the students, the teenagers, the young women, the doctors and journalists and filmmakers and artists, the reports, the parents, Iranians both inside and outside of Iran who refuse the terms of the regime, and are sometimes killed for it—they are part of the world we live in, too. They are the world we live in. The world is not only made up of despotic regimes and colonial empires. It is not only made up of dictators heading governments whose only purpose is to make those in power richer and richer. It is also made up of people who love life, who believe in freedom, who refuse to give up.

Mary Oliver, Upstream (2016)

This is a book of wisdom and wonder, arguments and deep quiet. Some of the essays sparked inside of me, star-like and vivid. Reading certain paragraphs, I felt my whole body come alive, reaching out to Mary across time and space and language: yes, yes, yes. She writes about poetry like it is the whole world, and it is. This is something I cherish in her work—her insistence that poetry matters and will go on mattering. It is also something I find myself chaffing against in her work, because so much of her poetry is small, quiet, domestic, internal.

These are not bad qualities. All I mean is that she doesn’t struggle, in the way some other poets do, with the uselessness and violence of poetry. This does not make me take her any less seriously. I take her as seriously as aliveness, as death. The gift of this particular book, for me, is in how it complicates my relationship with her, which is not a static. She is one of the poets who made me—not just poet me, but queer me, body me, ocean me, lonely me, me of Massachusetts, me of wildness, all of me. Teenage me and young adult me and almost-forty me. She is inextricable from who I am and who I am becoming.

At the beginning of our relationship, when I was much younger, this made me rigid, I think. I needed to believe in her absolutely, in her rightness—not hero worship, exactly, but I made of her someone who would see me no matter what. She wasn’t someone to learn from and argue with. She was someone whose work I wanted to hold me. I didn’t want to look any closer.

What a gift, to age into a thornier relationship. How humbling, how wondrous, to hold now the Mary of my youth and the Mary of my adulthood—both of whom, of course, are so much simpler than the breathing human she was.

Justin Torres, Blackouts (2023)

This is an incredible tapestry of a novel. How did Torres make this? How did he make something so full, so of the world, and yet so strange, so theoretical, so deeply about what cannot be said.

The book it reminds me of the most, though they are staggeringly different, is Edinburgh, and it’s because of this miracle of structure. Edinburgh, too, is a book so flawlessly crafted, so beautifully made, that I cannot begin to pick apart its strands, to see inside to how Chee built it. This book is like that. The relationship between the narrator and Juan is so specific. Juan is so whole, so himself, so singular. And yet he also feels distant. He comes alive in bits and pieces, jokes and conversations, this man whose inner life we never get to experience firsthand.

And it’s not just the characterization that feels this way. The whole book is like this. The photographs and ephemera, the story of Jan Gay, the blackout poems made with pages of Sex Variants, the pages from children’s books illustrated by Zhenya Gay—why? How did Torres, and through Torres, the unnamed narrator, select each one of these artifacts? I love the endnotes, in which the narrator explains, sort of, how he made the book. I love the detail and I also love how much mystery remains. In some of the endnotes he says, “well, I can’t tell you anymore, I’m not allowed.” In others, he provides context. It all has so much integrity. This book feels like a living ode to and elegy for Juan, and also for Jan Gay, and also, through these named people, real and imagined, for so many untold queer stories.

Qween Jean, Joela Rivera, Mikelle Street, & Raquel Willis, Revolution is Love: A Year of Black Trans Liberation (2022)

I loved this book of photos about the Stonewall Protests, weekly actions for Black trans liberation that took place in New York between June 2020 and July 2021. There’s a tiny bit of context (I would have loved more), including some quotes from the photographers, a conversation between Raquel Willis and one of the organizers of the protests, Qween Jean, and a short essay about the origin of the protests and of this book.

Mostly, though, this is an archive of images. The photographs are colorful and brash and full of movement. There are lots of classic protest photos of marches, signs, people blocking traffic. And there are closeups of nails and gowns and glam. There are so many photos of Black trans joy and tenderness: dancing, voguing, laughing, folks with their mouths wide open in mirth. Folks holding each other. There are photos of adornment and decoration, of fire and rage, of gender delight and communal grief.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, The Disordered Cosmos (2021)

I’ve been thinking a lot about wholeness, about what it means to bring all of who we are to our work, to our communities, to our relationships. So much of the world tells us: do not bring your whole self here. A lot of the book is about those barriers—over and over again Prescod-Weinstein is told she is not supposed to bring her “radical politics” into physics. She is not supposed to bring her lived experience as a Black woman into the room with the equations. She is not supposed to apply her understanding of Black feminist theory to particle physics. She is not supposed to be tired or angry. She is not supposed to talk about being a rape survivor. And, also: she is not supposed to talk about quarks and neutron stars in a book about race and power and gender in science. And to all of that she says: no fucking way, I’m bringing my whole human body and my whole human mind and my whole human heart to my whole human life. This book delighted me and challenged me. It made me grateful to be alive

Tyree Daye, Cardinal (2020)

This collection is full of roads, bones, ghosts, trees, and fields. Daye writes about his hometown in North Carolina, about his family’s travels in and out of the South, about the landscape of the places that made him. There are lots of birds, trees, and tobacco fields. There are highways and kitchens. He quotes The Green Book and The Warmth of Other Suns. Black movement, and the forces that seek to curtail it, are at the center of this collection. There is so much about geography and time, and so much about how the dead move (or don’t), and how ghosts also travel.

Jessica Slice & Caroline Cupp (words) & Kayla Harren (art): This Is How We Play (2024)

This is such a glorious book. Once again I just want to shout and shout about picture books that do a simple (but often profound!) thing really well. This book is a collection of spreads about families playing. The families, and the play, take all forms. Sometimes the parents are disabled and sometimes the kids are disabled and sometimes the characters’ disabilities aren’t visible. It’s just so warm and delightful.

A kid and their dad make a fairy house, and the dad’s cane makes a perfect tree. Sisters race around a track, one running and one rolling in her wheelchair. An adult and a kid look at the night sky through a telescope. A kid curls up with an adult, who is having a hard body day, and they read together. These are just a few examples. The text is rhyming and musical, and often includes the refrain, “with love and adaption, this is how we play!”

The authors are both disabled parents, and in their note they share that all the pages in the book are based on real families they interviewed about their lives. I found the whole book so moving and beautiful.

David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives (1991)

I’ve been thinking a lot about queer lineage, and about syntax. There were moments in this book that felt to me the way reading Small Rain felt. There are the obvious, surface-level similarities: both are written by white gay men, both are about illness, both are about art. Their sensibilities are quite different, though, as are the questions they are concerned with. Close to the Knives is often violent and sometimes disturbing. Wojnarowicz is so angry, and his anger spills and froths, as it should, of course he’s angry, the anger in this book is glorious, rational. But there’s also a frenzy here that is very unlike Small Rain. The beauty Wojnarowicz celebrates is street beauty—drugs and the wild rush of NYC nightlife, it’s fast and full of lights, it’s about the buzz and fizz of creation, of pushing art to its edges, of the unknown.

This book is about Wojnarowicz’s life both as an artist in NYC and as a kid on the streets in NYC. It’s a breakup letter with the U.S., an impassioned and clearsighted screed against empire, a dairy of illness and the death, a snapshot of AIDS activism, a chronicle of transient friendships. It’s direct and unflinching and at times graphic. It doesn’t feel like Small Rain except that it is also so tender. This is what I can’t stop thinking about. Underneath the frenzied syntax, the outpouring of fear and pain and exhaustion, there is this immense tenderness. Tenderness toward life, toward lovers and friends. I don’t know how to describe it except by describing the way reading certain passages made me feel, which is the same way reading certain passages in Small Rain made me feel. I felt an immense, overwhelming sense of love.

Chase Joynt, Vantage Points (2024)

This book is dense, expansive, thick with thinking. It’s the kind of nonfiction I adore, both in the way it breaks genre and form, and in the way it interrogates itself. Joynt is much more interested in questions than answers, and he’s interested not only in questions of content, but in questions of process. Throughout this book, he’s constantly questioning his own process and motivations. Why is he writing this story? Whose story is it? What is it doing? What does he want it to do? How does it intersect with other media, with the colonial history of Canada, with trans memoir as a “genre”?

It’s hard to capture everything he’s doing, but at its most basic, this is a memoir about childhood sexual abuse told through the lens of the work of Canadian media critic Marshall McLuhan. When Joynt learns of a family connection to McLuhan, it inspires him to dig into a variety of archives: McLuhan’s work, public historical archives, family archives, and his own personal archive of memory. Even this feels like a simplification of this book, which is about memory, masculinity, forms of language, archival violence and memory, the history of media, pop culture, and more.

Kazim Ali, Black Buffalo Woman (2024)

I read this book slowly over a few weeks, alongside Clifton’s How to Carry Water. It’s a thoughtful, nuanced, scholarly book of criticism—Ali delves deeply into Clifton’s body of work, offering plenty of insight and analysis. He does this with love, wholeness, and curiosity. It’s never dry; rather, the text sparkles. It is full of close reads of dozens of Clifton’s poems, many of which appear in How to Carry Water, and I loved the sense of immersion I felt as I read through both. Coming out of it, I feel bathed in Clifton’s language, her music and vision, the breathtaking integrity and of her poems. I already intended to become a Clifton completest, but the desire is even stronger now.

I love the way Ali approaches her body of work as a whole. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot about lately—how deliberately a body of work is made. Ali traces her work chronologically, and pays careful attention to not only the order of the collections she published, but to the order of the poems themselves in each collection. He identifies themes that recur over and over again—motherhood, grief, political upheaval, ancestral memory, religion—as well as particular periods and sequences of poems where Clifton is working (or reworking) a particular idea.

I also loved his attention to the incredible, meticulous craft of her poems. Clifton’s work is often characterized as “simple” and Ali unpacks this from multiple angles. I was delighted by some of the deep dives into the formal metrical elements of her work, its syntax and rhythm, the way she uses line breaks, her understanding and manipulation of prosody, her use of Black English. But Ali also delves into the deliberate simplicity of her work, untangling “simple”—a deliberate artistic choice—from ideas of naiveté, innocence, and an unnuanced understanding of the world.

Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003)

The most interesting and illuminating parts of this book, for me, are the first several chapters, in which Davis lays out the history of American and European incarceration. The prison as we know it today—a penitentiary system in which imprisonment is the punishment itself—is not especially old. It arose in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe, as a reaction to, and replacement for, corporal and capital punishment. Instead of torture and death, reformers were attempting to create a system of repentance and reform.

Of course, this is not what happened. The carceral system we have today includes both torture and death. But I found the way Davis explores the origins of the modern prison system to be extremely useful. First of all, she puts it in context. The prison system as it exists today in the U.S. is not some ancient, immovable edifice, as old as humanity itself. It is relatively new. It replaced other terrible, violent systems. I think this context matters, because when we believe that something has always been here, that it’s just “the way it is” it is much harder to imagine a different way.

Wishing you all sweetness, still. Today in her newsletter my friend

Rosamond

gave us all permission to be “so dead ass” about our joy. Yes. Here’s to that. Despite and within and through.