The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“where did the poems go? what is their trouble? what kind of water is i?”

— Danez Smith / “anti poetica”

“Sometimes people comment on how
beautiful my solitude is and sometimes my solitude replies
with a heart.  It begins to follow the accounts of solitudes
that are half its age.”

— Victoria Chang / “Grass, 1967”

“Notice nature
warn itself
of your intrusion—
that warbler
isn’t singing to you,
it’s alerting the bear
around the bend.”

— Clint Bowman / “If Lost”

“It takes a long time—too long—for me to understand the sun in this season is blinding, and the birds are flying into windows all around me, fourteen stories up. Flying into glass and falling.”

— Molly McCully Brown / “Virginia, Autumn”

“The people eat sick fish
because there are no others.
Then they get born wrong.”

— Margaret Atwood / “Frogless”

“Even if there was no grief
we wouldn’t stop lamenting
as though longing for the charm
of a distressed face.”

— Ha Jin / “Ways of Talking”

“If you can’t feel love in life you won’t feel it in death…”

— Sina Queyras / “Sylvia Plath’s Elegy for Sylvia Plath”

What I’m Listening To:

“Here comes life with his leathery whip
Here comes life with his leathery leathery
(Here comes life with his leathery whip,
here comes life with his leathery leathery)”

— Aldous Harding / “Leathery Whip”