Chicken Spaghetti

The TBR Stack

I'm so looking forward to jumping into this TBR stack from the library, but first have to finish Mary Gabriel's Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art. It's long, fascinating, and completely absorbing. I'm almost done.

The stack:

Milkweed Smithereens, by Bernadettte Mayer. At Chicago Review of Books, Mandana Chaffa writes, "I cannot overstate how much Bernadette Mayer’s work, and the poetic ethos and play she championed, means to me and to the poetry community at large. She celebrated the ordinary as extraordinary, equal parts funny and revolutionary[...]"

We Are Mermaids, by Stephanie Burt. I'm a big Stephanie Burt fan; an academic who writes in an accessible way, she's so dang smart, and her interests and subjects are wide-ranging. (Readers looking to learn more about contemporary poetry can start with Burt's The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them.) We Are Mermaids is a collection of poems; I heard about it on Han VanderHart's Of Poetry podcast, and knew I wanted to read it.

Space Struck, by Paige Lewis. I've read it before and look forward to reading it again. "Over and over again, the characters in Space Struck seek the natural world but encounter institutions, which in the collection (and, one gets the uncanny sense, in our actual lives) are rapidly becoming one of the last ways to experience nature," says Emily DeMaioNewton at Ploughshares.

Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books, and Questions That Grew Me Up, by Remica Bingham-Risher.  I heard the author on the VS podcast, made a note of the book (a collection of essays and poems), and happily bumped into it at the library. Bingham-Risher, "mines the experiences of Black writers in this jovial mix of memoir, essay, and homage to her literary 'guiding voices,'" according to Publishers Weekly.

Poems Are Teachers: How Studying Poetry Strengthens Writing in All Genres, by Amy VanDerwater. The author (and Poetry Friday regular) mentioned this book just last week on her blog, and the library had it! I know it will help with ideas for reading and talking to my first and second grade friends about poetry. (I'm a volunteer reader in a several public-school classrooms.)

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The Poetry Friday roundup is at Tabatha Yeatts' blog today.

Publication News: "Called Home"

I'm happy to report on Poetry Friday that a poem of mine, "Called Home," has been published at Unlost Journal's Issue #30: The Motivation of Winter. Link here.  I won't say too much before you read it, but this one borrows language from Southern obituaries.

It's my second publication at Unlost; the first was "You Keep Me Waiting in a Truck" in Issue #28.

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The roundup of Poetry Friday posts is at Molly Hogan's blog, Nix the Comfort Zone, on February 17th.

Cinquain: The Mural

The Mural

Street art
Colors shine bright
Artist wields a spray can
The way you might paint a poem
Tonight

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On Monday, "street" was the word for Alex Price's Twitter cinquain prompt. As with all of them, I could have gone in a hundred different directions; I can't wait to start a poem with "streetcar."

What's a cinquain? Answer here.

The Poetry Friday roundup is at Carol Varsalona's Beyond Literacy Link on February 10th.

Photo by ST. Mural by Craig Anthony Miller at the Knowlton event space and art park, Bridgeport, CT.