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?
¡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
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
Essentially a Nerd 