What I've Read: peluda by Melissa Lozada-Oliva

Thank you to NetGalley for giving me a copy of this book in exchange for review.
I love me some free-form, thoughtful, intersectional feminist poetry, so I'm thrilled that I was able to pick up peluda by Melissa Lozada-Oliva.

Filled with biting, vibrant poetry, peluda is a close examination of girlhood, cultural identity, Latina identity, immigration, and body hair. This series of poems tackles heady and deeply personal subject matter with wit, grace, anger and humour, organically illustrating the complexity of gender in both public and private space. These intersections of identity are chronicled through each poem, giving a confessional tone throughout the text. Occasionally experimental in form, the poems of peluda are also filled with complex language and metaphors, code-switching between English and Spanish, enhancing the conversational and confessional tone. Melissa Lozada-Oliva balances these multitudinous ideas and themes in a way that never feels overwhelming, confidently allowing the reader to consider the many things being said.

To that end, peluda isn't afraid to ask what hair does and means, what our bodies do and mean, and how they are compromised, protected, and negotiated by external - and often oppressive - systems. It's a bold and thoughtful account of femininity, the body, and the ways in which those concepts and realities are expressed.

What I've Read: Park Bench by Christopher Chabouté

Christopher Chabouté's Park Bench is a quiet, meditative graphic novel centered around - you guessed it- a park bench.

A unique approach to graphic narrative, the story at the center of Park Bench is told entirely without written dialogue. Instead, the reader bears witness to the peculiar rhythms of life for a rotating cast of characters: the marginalized, the retired, the reckless, the quiet, all interacting in the liminal spaces of both the comic panel and the park depicted therein.

The lack of dialogue gives a definitively cinematic and voyeuristic sensibility to the story - the reader feels at once immersed in its world, and distinctly outside of it, unable to be fully absorbed. The effect is also one in which the reader is writing the story themselves, being guided by the images on the page, all culminating in a satisfying - but not entirely dramatic - conclusion.

Park Bench is a graphic exploration of the concept of sonder - "the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own". It's a fun, heartfelt, and quietly moving journey into the concepts of space and stranger - and how we understand them as part of ourselves.

Thank you to NetGalley for giving me a copy of this book in exchange for review.

What I've Read: Best American Poetry 2017

Every year, I look forward to the latest in the Best American Poetry series; it's a wonderful way to gaze upon a sampling of the previous year's poetic output. I mean, I love poetry, but who could possibly keep up with every single piece in every single journal each year? We're so lucky to have a glut of access to great poetry, and equally lucky to have poetry anthologies to help us sort through it all.

This year's Best American Poetry anthology is particularly remarkable in that I don't know if there would be any anthology - a nonfiction/journalistic one, perhaps, but not necessarily - that would better encapsulate the social, emotional, and political turmoil of 2016-2017 than guest editor Natasha Trethewey's poetry selections.

The poems featured in this year's Best American series vary widely in terms of theme, execution, technique, et al. When placed together, however, a remarkable unfolding occurs: grief and joy share space; anger and upheaval marry revolution and hope. The text unflinchingly and properly examines what it means for the political to be personal and vice versa. Many of the poems carry their emotional heft in the interplay of this examination. There is, also, a balance of the individual and the collective, the historical and the personal, so the reader never feels lost in the chaos of the past year. This is anthology is reckoning, reflection, and revelation. The poems are representative of all of the confusion, clarity, and celebration that emerge as a result.

I would definitely recommend this for fans of poetry in general and the Best American Poetry series.

Thank you to NetGalley for giving me a copy of this book in exchange for review.

What I've Read: Generations by Flavia Biondi

Thank you to NetGalley and Lion Forge for providing copies of this book.

I love a good graphic memoir - it's probably my favorite genre of comic, especially after having been long burnt out on the superhero genre - at Generations by Flavia Biondi is a stunning example of the genre.

At once confessional, heartfelt, and introspective, Generations follows a brief period of coming of age for its protagonist, Matteo. He's back in his country hometown after a harsh breakup in Milan, living with his ailing grandmother and colorful aunts, and dealing with the dual challenges of being closeted and heartbroken.

Generations explores grief and love in its many iterations, framed principally by Matteo's breakup with his ex-boyfriend Massimo, as well as the difficulty of being estranged from his father shortly after coming out.

The introspection and self-growth in Generations unfolds organically, packing several emotional punches but never feeling overwrought or melodramatic. A beautiful examination of what it means to grow into oneself - and finding your place in your family and your own skin.

What I've Read: Land on Fire by Gary Ferguson

I have a strange confession to make:

I am absolutely fascinated by fire. I don't know why, exactly, and it's not in a pyromaniac sense - I, quite reasonably, fear fire - but the human relationship with fire is a surprisingly rich area of history. I went through a phase where I was heavily researching the history of arson investigation and talking about it with anyone who I thought might care (spoiler: no one did). I then moved on to volcanology. I then read a longform article about the Yarnell Hill fire and devoured it in one sitting, ignoring the pile of work next to me.

So when I saw Land on Fire in the NetGalley offerings, I hit "request" immediately.

Wildfires seem to dominate the news cycles every summer, with hot, arid conditions, lightning strikes, and human error all contributing to what can be a truly devastating force of nature. Land on Fire brings the world of wildfires and everything involved with them to life, giving a comprehensive overview of everything from what causes them to the intricacies of how they're fought. With its focus centered on the American West, Land on Fire steers itself away from jargon, covering the sometimes complex information in a way that's clear to people who might be unfamiliar with the biology or bureaucracy involved in fire suppression.

There are also stunning photographs peppered throughout, providing astonishing visual aids to accompany the text. Some of the information might be a little dry or dense at times, but Ferguson does well to make it come alive, even including specific historical examples to illustrate the text. When discussing the natural world, in particular, Ferguson's prose is rich with the lushness appropriate for describing a living, breathing forest.

I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in fire, natural history, biology, climate science, or fire-fighting.

Thank you to NetGalley and Timber Press for giving me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

What I've Read: Odd Bloom Seen From Space

Thank you to NetGalley and University of Iowa Press for giving me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Odd Bloom Seen From Space is a remarkable collection, not the least of which is for what it accomplishes and balances in each poem. At once, these poems are biographical and confessional and nostalgic, but never precious; self-aware but never smugly so; unflinching but without callousness. Thematically, these poems are filled with the reconciliation of histories, personal and public; memory, ancestry, and pop culture; man and literature and landscapes. In "Outside Los Banos, California", Welch writes "There's a brutal distance / between men", and it's this brutal distance that Odd Bloom Seen From Space investigates, makes known, and contends with in each verse. There are parts that are brutal, that unflinchingly meditate on alienation, and yet others that undermine the gravitas of all that and are, instead, flippant and funny. These elements never compete with each other, finding a reflexive balance in each poem that reads instead as simple truth. There are moments of confession, moments of reconciliation, and moments of amusement, all strewn together into a lively melange of poems that surprise, challenge, and delight the reader.

The poem "Carried By A Bee" also features what is almost certainly one of my favorite lines I've read this year: "if we are not the victims of our own kind hearts then / our stupid lives are sad".

What I've Read: I Feel Bad by Orli Auslander

Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Group for giving me a copy of this book in exchange for review.

I Feel Bad. All Day. Every Day. About Everything is a deft graphic exploration of guilt. Each page features an illustration and a reason why the author has felt guilty about something, collected into 100 drawings and reasons in total. These deeply personal reminsciences are unflinchingly candid and resonantly therapeudic. Particularly striking are Auslander's comments on parenthood; in a world where mommy bloggers dominate and Instagram-ready images of perfect families abound, Auslander's depictions of the frustration, humor, and guilt of parenting are refreshingly candid. Some of the reasons she "feels bad" can feel repetitive, but there is also a rich tapestry of areas Auslander explores in a short time and small space. She touches upon the cultural, personal, mental, emotional, and gendered, and how these factors all tie into daily life, family history, and family rearing. It's tempting to wish that the text was more memoir interspersed with drawing, but this type of honesty is stark, refreshing, and in its short form becomes even more impactful. The humor of her entries is more dark than one might anticipate, but that's a feature, not a bug: when dealing with this level of emotional intimacy, being completely light-hearted would feel much more jarring.

I would recommend this short read in particular for fans of Allie Brosh and Laurie Notaro.

What I've Read: There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce by Morgan Parker

I couldn't wait to have this book be my first read of 2017.

I love poetry, I love Beyonce (the release of Lemonade was doubtlessly a high point of 2016), and I love work that incorporates deft, political, experimental examinations of pop culture and identity. This book is all of that, and more.

There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce is a voyage of self-definition in the midst of history, contemporary problems both personal and systemic, and the invisible and visible structures that seek to impose definition and inhibit growth. The result illustrates the myriad ways in which exploring and celebrating self-growth, self-definition, and wide-awake witness to the world around us is what constitutes authenticity.

The image of Beyonce, herself, exists as a Muse, a rubric, and a challenge; the poems that utilize her as an icon engage with her in this way. She is an emblem for simultaneous embrace and response. There is an ever-present tension and celebration in how Beyonce operates in the text, demanding that we attend to iterations of womanhood, modernity, race, and class. The tone of the book is also largely one of exasperation; this is a point at which Parker unfolds the wry humor, biting wit, and moments of celebration present in the poems. More often than not, these elements are all present in the same poem.

The care with which Parker attends to each poem is evident. Most of the poems, both experimental and free-verse, are filled with allusions to literature, history, and pop culture (not only Beyonce), resulting in an overall effect that is deftly kaleidoscopic. The themes, tones, and allusions shift and turn in Parker's stunning examination of the exhausting and raw beauty of self-definition and womanhood.

Thank you to NetGalley for giving me a copy of this book in exchange for review.

What I've Read: 100 Books in 2016

2016 is almost at a close, and it's certainly been a year filled with challenges and change!

Aside from the nitty-gritty, more difficult personal stuff: I started a new position at work, started a blog covering my witchcraft practice, and published more this year than any previous, excluding 2010, but those were all unpaid. This year? All paid gigs. I'm working for free no longer!

I started training myself in reading Tarot cards. I dabbled in brushing up on my French. I started practicing yoga and keeping a day planner (hey, no achievement is too small)!

I'm proud of myself for having reached my goal of 100 books. It's been a busy, messy, wonderful, challenging time!

Here's a round-up of my favorite books from the year:

Favorite Book Published in 2016:

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch!

As I wrote in my post on this book, I don't usually read in the sci-fi/sci-fi thriller genre, but I'd heard so much hype about this book and was so intrigued by its description that I snapped it up from Blogging for Books as soon as I could. The twists in the plot, its philosophical themes, and its mysterious tone all made this one of the books published in 2016 that I enjoyed the most. I highly recommend it to one and all.

Favorite Classic Book:

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte!

I don't know if it's possible for a classic to be underrated, but when I'd signed up for the BerkeleyX Book Club through EdX, I'd fully expected to find the book to be boring. Instead, it was a beautiful Gothic meditation on identity, loneliness, and love - as well as self-preservation, class division, and secrecy. It quickly became one of my favorites of all time.

Favorite Nonfiction Book:

A tie between A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit and Upstream by Mary Oliver.

Mary Oliver is definitely an American national treasure, whether it's through her poetry, scholarship, or nonfiction writing - check out my thoughts on Upstream here. Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost was the first book I'd read in 2016, and it was a beautiful meditation on wandering and being lost, interspersed with history and memoir. 

Favorite Poetry Book:

Trebuchet by Danniel Schoonebeek!

I posted my review of Schoonebeek's Trebuchet here, but it's certainly worth talking about again. I read a lot of truly amazing poetry this year (a cursory glance through this blog will tell you as much) and will read hopefully even more next year, but Trebuchet remains my favorite of them all. Stark, experimental, and deftly observational, this book is poetry truly perfect for the times we live in.

Favorite Shakespeare:

Measure for Measure! Yes, the Bard gets his own category - I don't call myself a Shakespeare fangirl for nothing!

Not only is Measure for Measure my favorite Shakespeare play that I've read in 2016, but it's one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, ever, ranking with tragedies like Macbeth and Titus Andronicus and the sole other comedy, A Midsummer Night's Dream. (As You Like It is pretty okay, too).

A dark comedy, this play features executions, dick jokes, and contemplation on morality and mortality both - a 'problem play', to be sure!

Favorite Young Adult Book:

Gabi, A Girl in Pieces by Isabel Quintero!

I'm not a Mexican-American teenage girl, but this book still read as true to an essential part of the teenage experience. Sure, some plot points are a little over-the-top, but the voice of this narrative nonetheless makes it believable, fresh, and engaging. It's also a rare moment of a book containing diagetic poetry written by the narrator wherein the poetry is just as enjoyable as the prose.

                                                               Favorite Horror Book:

The Troop by Nick Cutter!

I had to distinguish this book from other books read this year, since this is also the category I write in - I didn't want to include anything published by myself or my friends! I also read The Shining for the first time this year, but figured handing it to Stephen King would be a cop-out. Everyone knows that The Shining is scary.

Anyway, I made the mistake of reading this body-horror book on my lunch breaks. At work. In a hospital cafeteria.

Suffice it to say that I still can't eat roast beef sandwiches without thinking of the visceral horror of isolation, starvation, and parasites.

Other Books I Read and Was Surprised to Enjoy:

The Hobbit! A Study in Scarlet! Gone Girl!

And with that, we bid my 2016 Reading Challenge adieu! May the new year find you merry!

What I've Read: Tremulous Hinge by Adam Gianelli

The poems of Tremulous Hinge are delightful in their play with theme and form; poet Adam Giannelli has a clear love of language and continuously utilizes it in an interesting way. Words become their own preoccupation in the text, being elaborated upon, challenged, and measured against each other in a manner both artful and thoughtful (which is to say that it never becomes too heavy-handed and meta-referential). This play with form is most apparent on a sentence-by-sentence basis, as Giannelli's skillfully deploys assonance, consonance, alliteration, et al. As a result, a number of the poems practically demand to be read aloud.

Striking images also populate the text, providing an artful sense of illustration to themes as widely varying as stuttering, loss, love and the myriad ways in which we find solace and consolation. Each poem is deftly felt and witnessed, often distilling particular moments into verse in a way that feels tonally similar to haiku, even if the poem itself is multi-stanza and/or free verse.

Giannelli's poems are carefully crafted with an impeccable alignment of details, making Tremulous Hinge an exciting and fresh debut poetry collection.

Thank you to NetGalley and the University of Iowa Press for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for review.

What I've Read: Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology

Birds are creepy, aren't they? From the poetry of Poe to the classic Hitchockian masterpiece The Birds, avian anxiety has long populated the horror medium.

Black Feathers, a new horror anthology selected by awesomely ubiquitous editor Ellen Datlow, adds its answer in the affirmative. The stories that populate these pages take on a wide variety bird species, including parrots, swallows, and, yes, the classic ravens, magpies, and crows. Each story is uniquely fraught with tension, offering new visions of the feathered fiends - some grim, some gory, and some gorgeously grotesque.

 Black Feathers includes stories from Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen Graham Jones, Paul Tremblay and many others who deftly examine the multitudinous angles of avian horror. The writing styles and story lengths offer a great deal of diversity within the anthology; none of the stories run together and all of them add something essential to the collection. Black Feathers will doubtlessly find fans in its well-executed examination of the unsettling, liminal realm of the avian.

Thank you to NetGalley for giving me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

What I've Read: Sun & Urn by Christopher Salerno

Thank you to NetGalley for giving me the chance to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

The poems of Sun & Urn by Christopher Salerno are a multifaceted exploration of grief – its contradictions, the beauty that can be found in the midst of sorrow, and, naturally, the keenly felt despair that comes with loss. This exploration evokes sentimental tones and subjects that never delve into the trite, always pushing forth into sublimity and surprise.

The grieving process of Sun & Urn is focused through ordinary objects that are elevated in surprising ways. In “The Evening Report”, Salerno writes: “I am falling in love with the material world”, reinforcing the necessity of attention to object; the emphasis on concrete forms that exist around us make them a grounding force in both life and poem. That is, the objects of Sun & Urn remind us that even after death there are bodies, there are material things, there is life. This sense is even reflected in the title Sun & Urn, emphasizing the large, universal, and distant in conjunction with the immediate material witness of past, present, and future.

In this way, each poem unpacks emotional upheaval directly and honestly in its exploration of what is left – in endings, death, beginnings, there are scattered aspects of people and lives left behind. These poems channel that sense of transformation, and carry with them a certain breathless witness that comes with contending with the inevitability of life and death.

What I've Read: bodys by Vanessa Roveto

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

bodys, the debut book of poetry by Vanessa Roveto, is a dreamlike landscape that underscores the inherent chaos of being human. The bodies of bodys are objects colliding with each other, and none of the anonymous characters of its prose poems are safe from objectification and otherness. Images related to food, sex, the body, medicine, death, and the trappings of modern culture all intersect with each other in a surreal, stream-of-consciousness fashion. Each poem is at once intimate, tender and brutal; the text refuses to let the reader be comfortable, subverting expectations and loosening structures as it builds them. Wry, eviscerating, and experimental, bodys tests the reader's comprehension of its numerous ideas and commands for attention in every phrase. There is an inherent orality to the poetic voice that situates the poems staunchly in the performative, uncomfortable, and dynamic - like bodies, these poems are both actors and acted upon.

I'd whole-heartedly recommend bodys for fans of surrealist poetry, bizarro fiction, and experimental literature in general. Squeamish readers or staunch traditionalists might want look elsewhere - unless they want to read something that challenges conventions at every turn and leaves them with much to unpack.

What I've Read: Upstream by Mary Oliver

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

There is a lot to be celebrated in iconic American poet Mary Oliver's writing. Her style combines a frenzy of details, lyrically drawn analyses, and impossibly precise revelations, creating in both poetry and prose a distinctive and vital voice in contemporary American literature.

The essays in Upstream largely cover topics ranging nature to natural evil to various American writers. While these topics are undoubtedly and respectively fascinating, the essays themselves are made all the more remarkable for the contemplative lines that are blurred between subjects. The deeply personal flourishes here, and Oliver's anecdotes underscore her numinous amazement and practical ruminations when it comes to life - not just human life, but all life.

Oliver's writing is eminently enjoyable and perfectly quotable, almost aphoristic, in a manner not unlike the Transcendentalist writers she profiles and examines. With skillfully deployed experimentation, Oliver provides a detailed, poetic taxonomy of the natural world and insight into some of America's most revered writers (as well as the act of writing itself). The essays here are luminous, nearly mystical in their emotional resonance, but also filled with shocking clarity and deep revelation. Upstream provides us with exactly what we need to hear about life, death, literature, and the natural world - even if we didn't know it yet.

What I've Read: Bread and Butter #1 by Liz Mayorga

I guess I'm still on my comic book streak! Here's the thing: I'm just starting to get acclimated to NetGalley, and did not realize that I only had until the Archive date to read a book that was approved for me. When I saw that Bread and Butter #1 was archiving soon, I jumped on it!

So, yes: thank you to NetGalley for giving me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This book was ostensibly the first issue of Bread and Butter, a comic series about a young Latina woman named Liana Caudillo living in San Francisco. Anyone who works in the creative industry while also juggling another job knows something about her struggle: finding time to balance the demands of your work while maintaining your true passion and side hustle (hello, me).

This comic is a great entry into these ideas, and displays the central tension in places like San Francisco well. In just 24 pages, Bread and Butter asks how a city maintains it soul with progress and the ills of gentrification. It also asks how we balance our passion with the demands of the day, and how we fall in love with the place we call home while maintaining a complicated relationship to how it operates, its injustices, and all its beauty.

It's also a perfect example of how these dynamics play out within the service industry: the employee doing their best to perform their job well under the constrictions of low pay and high expectations, as well as the challenge of serving people who often exist in a higher socioeconomic strata than your own. Asking these questions under this lens is brilliant; an honest look at the working class and serving class is a good way to get a grounded sense of how the interplay of class and labour operates in a real way (and these viewpoints are generally under-represented in pop culture).

Bread and Butter feels confessional, and, as such, it's a beautifully insightful slice-of-life comic. The artwork is great, and I'm interested to see where the story goes from here. I did regret that it was only the first issue, because it felt like something that would be wonderful to devour in one sitting. I can't wait to see what comes next for Liana Caudillo and the Bread and Butter series.

What I've Read: Equinoxes by Cyril Pedrosa

Thank you to Netgalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I have a confession to make: I got burned out on comics a few years ago.

I know. Weird, inconvenient timing: it happened even before every second movie in the theatres was a superhero adaptation. Somewhere around 2011, I went from voraciously devouring everything from Clowes to capes to feeling far too oversaturated with superhero and comic culture. This may have had something to do with the emergence of geek culture as a pervasive cultural force. Being the malcontent I sometimes am, I just had to stop before I soured on it forever.

I've been slowly bringing myself back into the rhythm of reading comics and graphic novels, and the rewards, so far, have been many. I got caught up on Rat Queens earlier in the year, have Saga up on the docket, and have just finished the remarkable Equinoxes by Cyril Pedrosa.

Equinoxes follows the intertwining lives of a group of strangers living in France, and all of the muddled beauty that exists in their associated milieu. The artwork is at once unique, familiar and aesthetically intriguing. The plot, narrative and illustrations are all crafted with meticulous attention that flows perfectly from page to page, giving each vignette a dreamy, cinematic quality. The characters are skillfully drawn into life, with their brief interludes leaving a sizable emotional impression as they each explore existential truths, the depth beneath the banal, and the fleeting beauty of each moment. At once raw, cynical, wry, and sentimental, Equinoxes is a graphic novel that demands you pay attention, for the lives depicted in its pages are both familiar and revealing.

What I've Read: The Best American Poetry 2016

Thank you to NetGalley for allowing me to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

Poetry is often plagued by the accusation that it’s written for an audience that consists, primarily, of other poets. The relative universal accessibility of poetry becomes a constant question, which is invariably followed by the sub-question: does the universality or accessibility of poetry actually matter?

I don’t know – I've never been able to answer that, not during my undergrad degree, or in the poetry workshops I attended, or in the pages of literary criticism and books of poetry I’ve read before, during, and after that time. All I know is that poetry has vitality and immediacy that makes the act of reading poetry an important human endeavor.

Are there poems that achieve and embody that vitality and immediacy in The Best American Poetry 2016? Yes, of course. There are beautifully deft, clever, soul-shaking poems contained within. Do I agree with all of the selections? No, but that’s to be expected.

There were poems in it that I actively disliked due to my own aesthetic reader-response tics; I have a general antipathy for pithy references to other poets in poetry (probably in part because it calls back the question of whether poetry is strictly for poets). This presented a bit of a problem, as meta-references to other poets are present in a large amount of the poems selected for this year's anthology. While that aspect can be a distraction, there are poems that either make the reference worthwhile or include it in such a way that it unobtrusively becomes part of the poem’s greater tableau.

As in all things, your mileage may vary – one of the great strengths of the Best American Poetry series is each edition falls under the editorial gaze of other established poets working in the medium and, as such, can contain any number of overt or subtle themes each year.  Either way, it’s always interesting to see what gets selected. Fans of poetry should be checking out this series every year!

What I've Read: Party of One: A Memoir in 21 Songs by Dave Holmes

Do you remember the '90s? That's when MTV VJ Dave Holmes came into the spotlight as part of MTV's "Want to Be a VJ" Contest. Paired against the enigmatically charismatic Jesse Camp, Dave Holmes lost - but still worked at MTV in the years afterward. This is but one part of Holmes' fascinating pop culture journey.

This memoir goes into the years prior to his MTV career, and delves much deeper than the twenty-one songs mentioned in the tagline. It's a heartfelt, conversational and frequently laugh-out-loud funny chronicle of Holmes' time as a pop-culture obsessed outcast struggling to express, retain, and reconcile his identity as he came of age.

Holmes' overview of pop culture from the past 30-odd years is enjoyable to read. The memoir is at its most successful and engaging when it delves deeply into its subject; Holmes' description of the highs and lows of coming of age as a gay man in a pre-Marriage Equality, pre-Ellen, time is worth reading in its own right.

I received this e-book through Blogging for Books in exchange for an honest review, and I'm very glad I did. It's a fun, easy, engaging read that will find fans among readers of pop culture memoirs like those of Chuck Klosterman and Rob Sheffield.

What I've Read: Trébuchet by Danniel Schoonebeek

Thank you to NetGalley for allowing me to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

The poems of Trébuchet are perfect for the nebulous social chaos of 2016. Stark, skillful, and unsentimental, these poems steel their focus on a world at the precipice of collapse. The tone and thematic tensions are established early; in the introduction Schoonebeek warns, “These poems were written to put you on a government watch list”. In the rest of the poem (as well as the poems that follow) the narrative is underscored by a playful, anxious kind of interpellation, best illustrated when Schoonebeek writes, “If these poems don’t throw themselves through your windows please burn them.”

The poems frequently veer into the territory of nihilism and paranoia, but manage to do so without cheapening or compromising the social critique at the heart of the collection. Trébuchet is deftly experimental in its styling and structure, and each individual poem carries its weight into the thrilling culmination found in “Dark-Eyed Junco Was Her Name”.

A startling, striking, and demanding book that rewards you with poems both finely-tuned and unforgettable.

The Year in Shakespeare: August 2016

I can't believe I haven't mentioned my life goal of reading the entirety of Shakespeare's canon on this blog. That's A Thing. A major thing, to me, in my life. I'd posted previously about my recalcitrant attitude post-high school vis-a-vis all things The Bard. I was, like I sometimes am, empirically wrong.

My university's 2000-level Shakespeare class renewed my passion for Shakespeare's work and all things Shakespearean adaptation, riff, and remix (well, somewhat. I have a lot of opinions and my mileage varies). Regardless, the class was a fantastic dip into the majority of Shakespeare's work; the year-long class covered a large swath of the tragedies, comedies, and history plays (with a soupçon of poetry).

I'm not really a completist in other areas of my life. I like what I like, am juggling two careers and three mental illnesses (which is to say that keeping my shit relatively together is another full-time job). But with so much of it under my belt, I figured, why not try to complete it?

I've read all of the tragedies except for Timon of Athens and all of the history plays save for Henry VIII and King John. That left me with a metric fuck-ton (not a real unit of measurement) of the comedies to read in 2016.

So far, I've read: The Comedy of Errors, Measure for Measure, All's Well That Ends Well, and The Merry Wives of Windsor, all thanks to the Folger Digital Texts archive.

                                     These covers are pretty but digitization is convenient!


Of these, Measure for Measure was my definite favorite; my preference for Shakespearean tragedy made the "problem play" automatically pique my interest, and I was rewarded with an execution plot, moral and existential questioning, and gallows humor.

Conversely, The Merry Wives of Windsor was one of the silliest things I've ever read, in any genre (this includes longform articles about juggalo culture). Reportedly written because the Queen wanted a "Falstaff love story", this play delivers that, and more. Spoilers, but, Falstaff gets his comeuppance when he's tricked into thinking other characters are fairies. 


I don't really have much to say about The Comedy of Errors and All's Well That Ends Well. They were perfectly serviceable Shakespearean comedies and probably more fun in performance than on the page - reading Shakespeare is always a delight, but sometimes it does take seeing it performed for it to become magical.

Hopefully, I'll get a chance to read more comedies, explore the apocrypha, and see a performance by local troupe Shakespeare By The Sea. Until then, rest you merry!