March:
I continued working my way chronologically through Louise Glück’s poetry collections. I’ve been stuck on The Wild Iris for a while, a book I’m glad to return to and want to savor.
I read The Red We Silk by Nicole Lachat: a beautiful debut collection and winner of the Michael Waters Poetry Prize. Nicole and I were in the same PhD cohort at UNL, where I got to read an early version of this book in a full-length manuscript workshop run by Hope Wabuke. It was beautiful then, and it’s beautiful now in its final version.
I read The Hungering Years by Summer Farah, a book I was so glad to pick up at AWP. (Read “The Figs Are Molding” in the Archive issue of Prairie Schooner’s online series Fusion. We also recently published an interview with Summer on the Schooner Blog.)
April:
I read Claude Royet-Journoud’s The Whole of Poetry Is Preposition, translated by Keith Waldrop and published by La Press. A slim little book of aphorisms and fragments which John Steen described as “the shards of a manifesto”—uh, yes, I’m into this. Some highlights:
“Our body looks flat to us, two-dimensional. Then the instant the heart, emotions, enter into play we gain density. Density sometimes means writing a book, but may also be the point at which you’re not sure you can do it.”
and:
“A book is not a property. Whose property is a body?”
and:
“I don’t write until I find the preceding book illegible.”
I also read How It Works Out by Miriam Lacroix. My god, this book! I devoured it and didn’t want it to end. Gorgeous on a sentence level, narratively and structurally compelling, it also does so much deft work at playing with the reader’s assumptions and expectations.
I went to New Orleans for the New Orleans Poetry Festival, where Caroline Crew, Lindsey Webb and I ran a generative writing workshop on smell and perfume. It was a packed room, and we had so much fun; I’m still thinking of the person who described one of the scents we passed around as smelling like “an ex—if he had been a good person.”
That trip was my first time in New Orleans, and it was pretty magical (as well as a little overwhelming): a whirlwind of music and food and bright colors and more people than I could process and heat and humidity that sucked every drop of sweat out of my body each day. One afternoon I went to the sculpture garden beside the New Orleans Museum of Art, where I stumbled upon my very first Louise Bourgeois spider that I’ve ever encountered in person. I stood underneath her for a long time, thinking of Michael Burkard, who showed this documentary about Louise in at least two of the classes I took with him. (I’ve been wanting to write something about Michael since he passed in 2024, but I still don’t have the words. But maybe soon.)
May:
I spent a week on the southern coast of Oregon visiting my sister with my mom and two of her friends, where I read Homebound by Portia Elan, which I was delighted to find in the Omaha airport on the way there. Since then, I’ve been yapping to anyone who will listen about how they need to read it. Such a beautifully imaginative and transportive novel. The fact that I got to read it oceanside was a huge bonus.
I read Reverse Requiem by Ina Cariño. I loved Cariño’s first collection, Feast, and this is a marvelous follow-up.
And currently, I’m reading Karen Babine’s All the Wild Hungers. Lovely short essays on cooking and cancer, prompting me to make a big pot of asparagus soup yesterday.