My first Susanna Kearsley was The Shadowy Horses, and I fell and fell hard: for those shadowy horses, and for the characters in that novel, and for the lush, almost mythic prose with which Kearsley brings worlds to our fingertips. Season of Storms, much to my surprise, is slightly later than The Shadowy Horses, but at least in this reading, my first, it felt much … Continue reading Season of Storms: A Susanna Kearsley Reissue
It’s nigh the end of another year here in Chicago, and what a year it’s been. I’m even finishing it out with a migraine—this one with nearly festive gold-colored auras! I would much rather go without the migraine, and the festive aura, but it also feels rather fitting that I’d end 2023 with yet more migraines. It’s been yet another year of trying to get … Continue reading 2023 Wrapped
It’s a strange Christmas this year, as bombs fall over Jesus’s birthplace and slaughter his people, and as climate change brings bleak rain and near-60° degree weather to Chicago. (If you run on Celsius, rather than Freedom Numbers™ like me, that’s 15°.) I’ve spent the day alone with Elvis, my cat and my best buddy/feline baby, for company. It’s been a pretty good day, in … Continue reading on Christmas 2023
Ruby Lang’s I Am Trying to Break Your Heart is a marvel of a novella, tightly written, tightly plotted, and filled with incredible character work. It will break your goddamn heart, but it will also make you laugh (and cry your eyes out—I think mine might be swollen, shit), and wince in sympathy, and, finally, it will give you the sort of happy ending that … Continue reading I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: A Novella
I walk, fairly often, from the building where I work to the South Loop office where a number of my doctors see patients. It’s a great situation for me: I can then catch the train at 11th Street, no cars necessary. But, lately, I’ve noticed something that is really bothering me: Chicago, which is never exactly flush with cash, is apparently paying cops to sit … Continue reading why is Chicago paying for cops to hang out in the middle of the street?
I should probably start this with an unfortunate acknowledgement: the copy I received of this zine is missing a few pages, by which I mean the book jumped from page 10 to page 15, missing no small amount of content in between. That out of the way, Faith G. Harper’s Unfuck Your Work: Makin’ Paper Without Losing Your Mind or Selling Your Soul, is a … Continue reading a very short review of Unfuck Your Work: Makin’ Paper Without Losing Your Mind or Selling Your Soul
Lyudmyla Diadchenko’s Magnetic Storms (Магнітні бурі), translated by Padma Thornlyre and printed by the micropress No Reply, rounds out this year’s Sealey Challenge for me. It is a beautiful volume: beautiful both in construction, thanks to No Reply, and in content, thanks to Diadchenko and Thornlyre. This came to Kickstarter right after Russia invaded Ukraine. It’s a hell of a time to bring forth a … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: Magnetic Storms
Hannah V. Warren’s [re]construction of the necromancer, one of Sundress Publications’ e-chaps, is the story of a Gretel you’ve certainly never met before. It’s eerie and violent and powerful, a narrative that feels like it’s telling a story a lot deeper and older than this vision of Gretel, thriving about Hansel’s bones. In her acknowledgement at the end, Warren calls her work “grotesque, speculative poetry.” … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: [re]construction of the necromancer
Today I managed to read another book of poetry in which faith plays a central role! I’m really onto something this year, guys! (I mean, considering that I hover somewhere between agnostic and atheist and am an okay Quaker and kinda a cultural Catholic and all. In any case, Jesse Bertron’s A Plumber’s Guide to Light, the 2021 Rattle Chapbook Prize winner, is a delicate … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: A Plumber’s Guide to Light
CooXooEii Black’s The Morning You Saw a Train of Stars Streaking Across the Sky, 2021 Rattle Chapbook Prize winner, is a poetics of family, of Indigeneity, and of Afro-Indigenousness. Sometimes it’s a mourning song, and sometimes it’s more a wink and a nudge, and always, it is both beautiful and powerful. We know immediately, from the title of the first poem of the collection, that … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: The Morning You Saw a Train of Stars Streaking Across the Sky
Christopher Salerno’s Deathbed Sext, 2019 winner of the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize, is strange and tender and funny, an exploration of masculinity and mortality and urban life that also explores all sorts of new possibilities for sexting. Parts of Deathbed Sext are overtly horrific, carrying violence like a torn and bloodied flag. The first poem in the collection, “Headfirst,” which follows a boy who’s … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: Deathbed Sext
Somehow, without quite realizing it, this has become a summer of faith through the books of the Sealey Challenge. Not the sort of faith you’d hear in a church, to be sure—or at any rate, not most churches—but a faith true and pure all the same. Parts of Arielle Cottingham’s Machete Moon, published in 2022 as an e-chap by Sundress Publications, feel like a prayer. … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: Machete Moon
The first time I saw Diana Goetsch’s In America—both online, at its Rattle home, and in the flesh—I saw the Statue of Liberty giving the world the finger, and mentally shrugged. It seemed very understandable, especially after what we’ve seen, and where we are now. When I actually pause, howeer, and look fully at that cover photo, I realize I’m seeing it wrong: our great … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: In America
John W. Evans’ The Fight Journal, winner of the 2022 Rattle Chapbook Prize and published by Rattle in 2023 (the first chapbook of my Rattle subscription, in fact!), pulled me in from uncomfortable beginning and held me through bittersweet ending. It’s a sad, difficult book: it is, after all, about divorce. I think it’s also about mental illness, and gendering. But I also think I … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: The Fight Journal
Jonaki Ray’s Lessons in Bending, one of Sundress Publications’ 2023 e-chaps1, is a lesson in the heartbreak and desperate hope of humanity. Lessons in Bending leaves me with so, so many questions. Several of the poems here are dedicated to someone: “Lessons in Bending” is dedicated to K, “You Will Be Saved” for Rose Williams, “99” for T. I want to know who they are, … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: Lessons in Bending
I am not entirely sure I understood Louise Glück’s The Seven Ages. It is deeply interior, and built around summer—as a season, and as a concept—and, well, I’ve never much cared for summer. But though it was originally published in 2002, there are moments that feel almost frightfully prescient, and, in the midst of summer musings, there are sparks of intense beauty. Glück’s “Civilization,” like … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: The Seven Ages
Lauren de Sá Naylor’s Gazing Down On It, published in 2022 by Ugly Duckling Presse, is strange and surreal, a dreamscape of neoliberalism and gender and COVID-19. Because this is, very much, (prose) poetry of the COVID era. When I say that this is a dreamscape of neoliberalism, I mean both that this is a poetics of dreams in which the word “neoliberalism” gets used … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: Gazing Down On It
Junious Ward’s Sing Me a Lesser Wound, the tiniest of chapbooks, number 42 (2020) of Bull City Press‘s charming Inch series (yes, it is an inch by an inch by an inch!), is astonishing in all the best ways. (Also, hi guys, I’m back! I’ve got a backlog and I still have the migraine that’s had me crawling for the past four days!) Ward is … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: Sing Me a Lesser Wound
I was not always sure, as I read Connie Voisine’s And God Created Women, published in 2018 by Bull City Press, exactly what Voisine was doing, or exactly what she meant. But I was damn well sure of her anger. I could feel it simmering under every word. And God Created Women is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a woman’s story. Or maybe it’s women’s stories, plural, the … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: And God Created Women
Christina Olson’s The Last Mastodon is, ostensibly, about fossils: the bones of the dead, the creatures pulled from La Brea and its surrounding lands. The physical markers, as it were, of the land’s past. But instead, The Last Mastodon, published in 2019 by Rattle, is fundamentally about us, and what it means, for good and for ill, to be human. Olson threads the needle of … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: The Last Mastodon
Michael Mark’s Visiting Her in Queens Is More Enlightening than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet, a 2022 Rattle Chapbook Prize winner, will resonate deep in the soul of anyone who has cared for, or watched the decline, of a loved one with dementia or Alzheimer’s Disease. It is a terrible loss, a loss of self, and Mark chronciles this loss of his mother … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: Visiting Her in Queens is More Enlightening than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet
You’ll know, from the first words of the first poem, “La Nieta,” of Raquel Vasquez Gilliland’s incredible Tales from the House of Vasquez, published in 2018 by Rattle, that these are poems of women’s lives, women’s souls, women’s realities. Men rarely even appear on these pages: a priest, here and there; a father, a brother, a grandfather. They are bit players here, for this is … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: Tales from the House of Vasquez
Naming the No-Name Woman, Jasmine An’s Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize-winning tour de force, was published in 2016, after winning the 2015 Prize. It feels as if it could have been written yesterday, and will probably feel that way when I read it again in a decade. Through the actress Anna May Wong An explores identity, racism, class, and gender. Wong is the mirror through … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: Naming the No-Name Woman
At Night My Body Waits, Saúl Hernández’s heartbreaking, beautiful chapbook and winner of the 2021 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize, is an earthy dreamscape, a poetry of liminality. It speaks to our vicious time, and it speaks to me as someone who once served a lot of first-generation Americans as they made their way through college, and I think, in its way, it will speak … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: At Night My Body Waits
Today, a re-read of a book I’ve carried with me ever since I first read it in 2021: Alexis Almeida’s I Have Never Been Able to Sing, published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2018. When I say I’ve carried I Have Never Been Able to Sing with me, I really mean it. I’ll be sitting at my desk and think of a line, or a … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: I Have Never Been Able to Sing
Al Ortolani’s Hansel & Gretel Get the Word on the Street, a Rattle Chapbook, is poetry of the classroom, told from the teacher’s vantage point. More specifically, it’s the vantage point of high school and middle school teacher. (Bless the teachers who can handle middle schoolers: they’re terrifying in groups.) It varies from tender and charming and funny to sometimes eye-rolling, and it dropped me … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: Hansel & Gretel Get the Word on the Street
Jahan Khajavi’s Feast of the Ass, published this year by Ugly Duckling Presse, is a strange creature, filled with sly humor, facing violence head-on, awash in lust frustrated and sated alike, filled with customs and cultures and tributes to the dead of yesterday’s Persia and today’s Iran, of England and Rome and France and beyond. The title itself is a part of this syncratic poetry, … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: Feast of the Ass
I’ll start with the most basic of confessions: I know I didn’t understand everything Sadé Powell wrote in wordtomydead, and I know that even when I re-read her words—no matter how many times I should re-read them!—I will never understand all of it. And part of that is cultural—Powell is a Black woman, and I am white—and part of it is, well, neurological. This is … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: wordtomydead
Nancy Miller Gomez’s Punishment, part of the Rattle Chapbook Series, is in some ways close kin to Kathleen McClung’s A Juror Must Fold In On Herself, which I read yesterday, and which was also published by Rattle: both take on the justice system in America, and neither one is exactly complimentary. Punishment follows Miller Gomez through the prison in which she teaches poetry to incarcerated … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: Punishment
Kathleen McClung’s tightly-woven, expertly-written, startlingly lovely A Juror Must Fold In On Herself is fascinating as a work of art, standing alone; as a work of memoir, exploring the foibles of the American legal system; and, finally, as a masterclass in the poetic form. It is stunning in so many ways, perhaps most of all that McClung has taken her time on a sequestered jury—vehicular … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: A Juror Must Fold In On Herself
In She, Self-Winding, Vietnamese American translator, poet, and all-around Renaissance woman Luu Dieu Van creates sacredness from the profane, builds out memories of war from sex toys, forges identities through maxi-pads. It is earthy poetry, and also almost impossibly deep, each line (and sometimes each word!) running to multiple different interpretations. Dieu Van celebrates femininity through She, Self-Winding, from unabashedly sexual women and girls enjoying … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: She, Self-Winding
My guys, it turns out I can no longer read anything about the U.S. military without my mind skipping over and waving around the blood-drenched flags of coloniality and class-based mortality and morbidity, as lower-income Americans are funnelled toward our brutal military, trying desperately to find a space where they might somehow make it, even if that space might come with blood. Amanda Newell’s I … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: I Will Pass Even to Acheron
I chose Cassandra Bruner’s The Wishbone Dress first of all for the 2023 Sealey Challenge because I have been lusting over the cover ever since I first saw it some years ago over at Bull City Press. I didn’t expect to cry my way through (and apologies here to the one and only Libba Bray, whose title I am stealing) a great terrible beauty, but … Continue reading The Sealey Challenge: The Wishbone Dress
Way back in 2022, I was the chair of the American Library Association’s Libraries Transform Communities Engagement Grant. It was a special year: we got to award TWO grants instead of the usual one! And now, in 2023, it will be my very, very great honor to introduce the Metropolitan College of New York Library‘s Black Maternal Health Initiative. The webinar is free; you just … Continue reading Please join the Programming Librarian & MCNY to learn about the Black Maternal Health Initiative!
The Captive Merman’s Promise, by Zoey Castile (aka Zoraida Córdova), is, I guess, a bonkers romance. It’s also gorgeous and heartbreaking and joyous, a wild ride of emotions packed into a slim little package. Our main characters are Amada Palacios, who consumed and is being consumed by a curse that has haunted her family for generations, and Rónán, the captive merman, once a great warrior, … Continue reading Peculiar Tastes: The Captive Merman’s Promise
Who We Lost: A Portable Covid Memorial, edited by Martha Greenwald and drawn from her site WhoWeLost.org, was published last fall by the Midwest’s own Belt Publishing. It’s been sitting on my to-review pile for even longer. I’m glad to say that my review has finally been written, and is now available on Third Coast Review. If you’ve been looking for a way of memorializing … Continue reading Review on Third Coast: Who We Lost
I am both a regular rider, and a passionate defender/lover, of public transportation. More specifically, I’m a Metra Electric (University Park line) person. I grew up on the line, frequently taking it from Hyde Park to the Loop as a kid, then from Flossmoor to Van Buren as a college student, and, now, Homewood to Millennium. I do not, for a plethora of reasons, enjoy … Continue reading Metra Electric needs to get their elevator act together
Nalini Singh’s Angels’ Blood, the first book in her Guild Hunter series, is one hell of a trip. By which I mean, it’s dated as hell, it’s weird af, and I kinda loved everything bananas minute of it. Angels’ Blood was originally published in 2009, and in many ways it really feels like a 2009 book. I haven’t run into the word “exotic” so much … Continue reading Guild Hunter: Angels’ Blood
¡Feliz Día de la Independencia! Not U.S. independence from the Brits, naturally—today is Mexico’s Independence Day, hearkening back to the good old days when a decent chunk of the U.S. was actually Mexican territory. You see, September 16 is the day a lot of us estadounidenses think we’re celebrating when we go out and get drunk on the anniversary of the first battle of Puebla—but, of course, … Continue reading ¡Qué viva México! Miguel Hidalgo, José María Morelos, and the Road to Mexican Independence
Essentially a Nerd 