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
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
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
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
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
Essentially a Nerd 