Tag: #SealeyChallenge
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The Sealey Challenge: (Selections from) Liberamerica
Monchoachi’s Liberamerica, translated by Patricia Hartland for Ugly Duckling Presse’s Señal series, is a beautiful book, and a difficult book, and a book that demands to be read far more than once. It’s also a pretty incredible book with which to end this year’s Sealey Challenge. First, a bit of a disclaimer. I don’t have […]
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The Sealey Challenge: Good Luck Gold and Other Poems
I’ve read rather a lot of Janet Wong’s back catalog this year, and today, my second-to-last day of the Sealey Challenge 2021, I read another: Good Luck Gold and Other Poems, originally published in 1994 (I had that shirt then too, btw), and just as relevant today as it was then. Good Luck Gold is […]
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The Sealey Challenge: Transit Blues
Keijiro Suga’s Transit Blues, translated from the Japanese largely by the author himself, is a strange, often luminous little chapbook, a collection of poetry that explores space and time (and corvidae) with a deft, loving touch. “Walking as a Prayer,” the first poem in the collection, sets the tone for the rest of the book: […]
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The Sealey Challenge: Boys Quarter
Chukwuma Ndulue’s Boys Quarter is an exquisite, difficult, sometimes haunting chapbook, a collection of poetry that deeply explores time and space and self and, along with them, the haunting, violent presence of coloniality. Ndulue’s epigraph comes from Hart Crane, a snippet from “Voyagers” that sure sounds like it’s kissing goodbye to the innocence of youth, […]
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The Sealey Challenge: Dark Matter
Eileen Chong’s Dark Matter is a book of layers (like an onion! or an ogre!), a series of poems in which almost every word has more than one meaning—and must be read more than once, to fully appreciate the nuances present. Dark Matter begins with the cosmos. Its epigraph is taken from Carl Sagan: “The […]
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The Sealey Challenge: New Moon / Luna Nueva / Yuninal Jme’tik
Women and the moon have long been linked, in cultures across the world. In New Moon, originally Yuninal Jme’tik in the poet’s native Tsotsil, Luna Nueva in her own Spanish-language translation, Enriqueta Lunez writes poetry of womanhood, words of woman born, reaching out to the moon. I’ll preface this simply: I’m going to need to […]
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The Sealey Challenge: Night Garden: Poems from the World of Dreams
We’re in the midst of another storm, here, and in the midst of a storm of a week, and so I picked, today, a warm, magical little book of poetry awash with dreamy illustrations: Night Garden: Poems from the World of Dreams, a 2000 collaboration between poet Janet Wong and artist Julie Paschkis. (They also […]
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The Sealey Challenge: Fry Bread
I don’t usually read by flashlight—it’s honestly hard on the eyes—but, by God, I was going to finish my twenty-fourth Sealey Challenge book of the month, and I did, even if I couldn’t post it here. And so, by flashlight, in the midst of a massive storm, I finished Kevin Noble Maillard and Juana Martínez-Neal’s […]
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The Sealey Challenge: Catcall
I think I was seven or eight the first time I was catcalled, although I’m not really sure. I’d say I’ve gotten used to it—I’m in my mid thirties now, after all—but one doesn’t really get used to the invasion, the threat of violence thrumming under the surface, or just above. Holly Melgard’s Catcall is […]
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The Sealey Challenge: Lineage of Rain
There are times—like, a LOT of times—when I think about my MA advisor. I hear her voice; I see her banging a book on the table or emphasis, or waving it in the air, or demonstrating how one properly annotated one’s texts. (By which I mean: every single inch of potential white space is covered […]
Essentially a Nerd 