These are the books I read in the month of December, 2022—

Hallelujah, Giant Space Wolf by Daniel Bailey

This one took me a while to get through because I’d have to stop after nearly every poem to take a picture of the ~2 pages I’d just read and send them to someone. This one’s more sprawling than Drunk Sonnets, though not as sprawling as A Better Word for the World, which is not a qualitative statement. Daniel Bailey is excellent in either mode. Need to figure out how to be more like Daniel Bailey.

The End of Vandalism by Tom Drury

Hot dang. Just delightful. I marveled at how far outside my wheelhouse this novel is, how hard it must’ve been to write. A full small town of colorful characters. I oddly Stranger Thingsed them in my head, which was weird. The main character is a cop so I just pictured that warmly gruff handsome dude who also makes me think of Nick Offerman. And so the new wife looked like… oh gosh, what’s her name. Not Parker Posey. Not Helena Bonham Carter. Wynona Ryder? Rider? Ryder. The one who got in trouble for stealing stuff? Or doing drugs. Stealing stuff on drugs. Stealing drugs. I only watched one season of Stranger Things. I’d watch ~8 seasons of a TV show based on this book, or however many seasons there are of Stranger Things now. Oddly, I think it could actually be done. I wonder what the status is on this book’s IP. Somebody ring up Netflix. Thank you, Joshua, for sending this to me. I really liked it. (Just looked it up. Winona. Dangit.)

Characters by Derek Maine

I’ve really liked many of Derek’s pieces online. I’ve always compulsively winced whenever I see Derek doing Derek things on the timeline. I was ready to accept that I wasn’t going to get to this one given that life is short, time is precious, etc., but then I changed my mind. Not about life and time, but about getting to this one. I don’t regret it, but I also don’t think it was entirely successful. I think it failed in a compelling way. I admire Derek’s ambitiousness with the scope of this book and the way it’s woven together. It falls short for me in seemingly patting itself on the back for being clever or confessional or confrontational or risky, when it wasn’t really very much of any of those things. If you lose a friend for writing a thinly veiled story, by all means process that on the page. Fabricate around the edges for the sake of a narrative. Divulge some nasty secrets and make some up too so people can’t guess what’s real. That’s all great. Hmm. I keep going back and forth feeling like I’m being too negative or too positive, and I’m gradually talking myself into liking the book more. The individual pieces are good. They fit together pretty well. It needed some room to breathe or something.

Letters to Emma Bowlcut by Bill Callahan

Posted a pic of the cover to my IG story and got way more engagement than normal. A frequent contributor to NOON said “One of my all time favorites,” which made sense. The host of a literary podcast that I enjoy but don’t listen to very often said “Never seen one in the wild,” then “Is it good or is it wack,” then “I love Bill but I can see it going either way lol.” I responded “I really like it so far! It’s hard not to read in his voice, and is kinda charmingly overwrought like his lyrics, but the unselfconscious melodrama fits the epistolariness perfectly,” to which the pod host heart-reacted. Half of my favorite indie lit power couple asked “Wow, how is it?” I said roughly the same thing that I said to the pod host. I may have even copy+pasted part of my answer. I’m embarrassed by that. Another friend said “Cool.”

Literally Show Me a Healthy Person by Darcie Wilder

I guess I just really like reading tweets. Especially good tweets. I like how someone’s recurring preoccupations reveal themselves when you get a nice corpus like this to digest in one go. It’s a great document/snapshot of a life. More of you should tweet like this.

Considering how exaggerated music is by Leslie Scalapino

So many of my friends favor brevity and clarity, so it’s nice to be reminded that convolution has its joys. Sometimes I forget who I really am and have been. When I posted this cover to my IG story, someone who has tattooed me a few times responded admiringly about the cover. I replied with the image credit, which is “Twin Suns” from Makrokosmos II by George Crumb. Curious about the piece, I found that it accompanied (and maybe even depicts the actual musical notation of?) a piano composition. I looked it up on Spotify and listened to ~30s before turning it off.

Plans for Sentences by Renee Gladman

I get that I’m not fully “getting it,” but I’m enjoying not getting it. It’s horizon-expanding to mix up ideas of writing and mark-making and mapping and space on the page with different concepts of scale and interior logic for overloaded terms as if familiar English words don’t mean what I am sure they actually mean.

Funeral by Daisuke Shen and Vi Khi Nao

Building off some assumptions based on formatting decisions about who wrote which portion of this text, I really enjoyed this absurd volley of legend, celebrity, food, and something even more geometrically elaborate than just a love triangle. Interdimensional love fractals?? One section appears to have been the framework—just the headers—for what could have easily been 24+ more pages of heart-rooted antics that I would’ve happily read, but I also enjoy what happens to the flow of time and consequence in the omission. It felt like a canny and clever decision that may have just been “feeling done with this.” Vi and Daisuke are very exciting writers.

Accept / Reject by Erin Dorney

Nice, spare, well-spaced, and meditative. Not too bleak or effortfully profound. Solid erasure work, engaging on several levels. Cheerful book object. A pleasure to own. Also, an easy way to get in a hundredth book on the last day of the year.

Told myself I wasn’t gonna do this this time/anymore, but had some notes and figured I’d post em. These are the books I read in the month of November, 2022—

The Missing Girl by Shirley Jackson

Hadn’t read any Shirley Jackson (flagrant foul for someone who went to Bennington) and also didn’t have any firm idea of what to expect. These stories have that pervasive low-grade dread that I’m drawn to. Often, when late to reading someone super influential, their moves will have been copied and mutated so many times that it all feels familiar and almost too simple or obvious. That wasn’t the case here! They felt quite contemporary. I enjoyed that characters were named things like Piglet and Snark.

I Hope You Enjoy the Food by Zac Smith

This book is disarmingly “straight,” by which I guess I mean practical. There is advice, and it seems constructed in a way that is meant to be convincing and useful. Zac’s voice and humor is there, but it serves a concrete function. I’m tempted to actually put it on my cookbook shelf. This makes the third book of Zac’s that I’d consider giving to friends/family/non-readers as a gift. It helped me reflect on what I value and enjoy about cooking, and the role it has in my life. It gave me ideas for how to break out of a meal-planning rut. I’m torn between wishing I had a Zac-like person in my life (to feed me) and wishing I were more like Zac (creative, resourceful, subtly inventive about matters of sustenance).

Some of Them Will Carry Me by Giada Scodellaro

I got hung up on the passive voices and dislocation in this book. I couldn’t figure out how to relate to it. The food parts made me hungry. There were little glimmers of excitement, but it often felt (oddly, for a Dorothy Project book, in my opinion) very #flashfiction—linguistically pretty, intriguingly prickly, and “sensuous,” but without much of anything tangible to grasp.

Blindness by José Saramago

This book was tedious and exhausting. I disliked it similarly to the way I disliked The Marriage Plot. It had a wrongheadedness laying bare a fundamental misunderstanding of the human condition. A writer I admire recommended this, and I’m now wondering if she might secretly hate me.

Name and Noun by Stephanie Yue Duhem

Stephanie is smart and funny online. I thought it was interesting that when this was released, she disclaimed the “identity” aspects of it. Undergrad Crow would have loved the wordplay here. I don’t mean that as a dig; I’m much dumber now than I was then. Her twitter handle (@poetrygrifter) prompted the thought that buying and reading the book means that I am the poetry-grifted.

Feds on Vacation by Big Bruiser Dope Boy

I’d like to believe I’d have had the aesthetic integrity to dislike this book even if I hadn’t stumbled into Mr. Boy’s crosshairs, but I guess I’ll never know for sure. This reflection prompted some interesting thoughts about the subjectivity and arbitrariness of art’s “worth,” but teasing that out further here would be attributing more credit to this book than it deserves.

These are the books I read in the month of October, 2022—

A Horse at Night by Amina Cain

Amina Cain is one of my favorite writers, and Dorothy Project is one of my favorite presses. This is a very strange book (by which I mean it resists neat categorization), and despite my increasing aversion to “writing about writing” and my unfamiliarity with some of the books she mulls over most thoroughly, the ways she places unsuspecting texts in conversation and weaves shifting preoccupations, self-awareness, and interrogation make it totally propulsive. I got a little charge each night as I got into bed at the prospect of returning to these pages. Her “diary of fiction” is close to what I aspire to with my own logging of readerly impressions—an associative constellation (is that Adorno?) that honors chance and personal meaning-making such that a juxtaposition of references is converted into fresh, new thought. With creative and editorial permission and encouragement, Cain thrives while extending the effort of synthesis and thinking on the page.

The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras

This is one of the books Amina Cain treats with most recurrence and care in A Horse at Night, and maybe it’s symbolic of my markedly less intelligent synthesis that I let myself be continually distracted and amused by seeing the name “Lol” all over every page. LOL. I did appreciate the benefit of Cain’s connective leap from this to Ferrante’s novels, and the potency and volatility of female friendship. I loved The Lover, and am glad to finally be getting back to Duras. During the days I had this on my nightstand, Bonnie asked “are you reading an erotic novel?” and I said “no,” and described the plot, and she said, “sounds like an erotic novel.”

The Drunk Sonnets by Daniel Bailey

I’ve got decreasing (nonjudgmental) patience for drunkenness these days, but this book of heartsick poems totally won me over and reminded me of the occasional beauty of belligerence. It’s gleeful and sad and grandiose in the best way. Daniel saw me post a photo of the first edition cover, and, saint that he is, not wanting me to miss out on the added content in the second edition, sent me another copy! I’m doubly glad about the bonus book because the used copy I bought has extraordinarily inane annotations on every third poem (“weird wording,” “?,” “true,” “makes sense,” “sad,” and “he gave it his all.”) The nonsequitur and violent tendencies seem a product of the era (2012), but feel “earned” and so have aged better than I might have expected. Reading this, I felt very warmly toward Daniel, admiring of the longevity of his poetry-writing life (last year’s A Better Word for the World—mysteriously $5 on Amazon right now—is also stellar), and inspired (based on my perception of his social media presence) by the way he seems to balance his work, family, and creative lives with integrity and honesty. I repeatedly thought to myself, “Daniel Bailey is a gem.”

Animal Days by Joshua Beckman

Ok it’s probably obvious by now that I’m choosing poetry and other short books in my haste to make ground on my annual reading goal. I read Take It 13 years ago, saw him read, and had him sign it, and have since bought but not read several of his Wave books. The shapeyness of the lines in this book at first felt very deliberate and useful, giving it a runaway, playful kind of energy. It had a lot of momentum. Either the effect wore off a little, or the quality of my reading attention diminished. Overall, I enjoyed the pleasurable nature of word pairings and sequences, but had a hard time comprehending the organizing principle of the book. I’m not a great reader of poetry. If I were, I’d probably read this book several more times in order to truly soak it in, or something.

Genesis 0 by Isabelle Nicou

I really liked Paresis. I’m eager to read Stricture, in large part because it’s translated by Kaycie Hall. This one lay between! By no fault of its own, my enjoyment of this one suffered from my lack of reverence for theater actors / historical plays, though I admired the way early pregnancy and an abortion attempt are documented from the lens of physical embodiment. I will probably remember this one for the clarity of its scope and the finitude of its timeline, both of which are abstract ideals for my own writing. Beginnings and endings, what a thought!

being there with my sister transported me back to childhood trips to “elitches” (not sure what it is or was or has ever officially been called or how it’s spelled) in denver. after shepherding my kid around the smaller structures, failing to entice him up or down anything, and facilitating some play with cousins, I whispered to my wife asking for permission to abandon my post

teen cousin talked me into doing the gnarliest one first: prospector’s pan. you plunge immediately into deep darkness and then wind up going round and round this huge toilet bowl, and get flipped pretty much upsidedown when it spits you out

middle road one is probably the most pure fun, and they let you go down double. that one goes outside the building briefly, which is novel but happens so quickly and in the dark that it’s probably more of an eyecatching gimmick for people passing by on the highway (and a hassle for building maintenance)

then there’s the claustrophobic tubeless / body-only luge, kinda rough on the shoulder blades and “thrilling” but not really “enjoyable”

returned to kid duty, and enthusiastically recommended the middle slide to my wife. she would most likely have sat it out, but didn’t wind up needing much convincing

when she came back she said it was fun, but that her neck and back and head hurt, and she thought she might have whiplash

after lunch (1.5 hotdogs, diet coke) and some downtime (kids on tablets in hotel rooms to forcibly rest their weary bodies) we went back to greet the next wave of family in the waterpark

this batch of adult relatives mostly sat, so those of us with kids got back in the water. the space was cavernous and echoey, so the only way to co-exist comfortably with the noise was to contribute to it. the little ones were most interested in these fountain jets that they could stand, sit, and lay on. they discovered they could redirect the stream at each other. they started kicking and smacking the already airborne water. it was mostly acceptable kids-area behavior except for when the smallest of babies came crawling by. some other family was kindly sharing some toys that were fun to make race down the shortest slide. they were also fun to throw, but I tried to discourage that without going so far as to exert any actual disciplinary authority, figuring I’d need to save that for later

felt the impulse to ride a slide again, curious whether it might be possible to deliberately get stuck spinning in prospector’s pan or, alternately, go more quickly down its hole without having to swirl around so much. tagged in another adult to be attentive but not-too-near the kids (proximity seems to escalate conflict, while calm and slightly peripheral supervision allows them to work things out in their own way). tip-toed over to wait for someone to surrender a tube, climbed the ~4 flights of stairs, and launched myself down

satisfied, climbed out of the landing chute / lazy river and readjusted my clinging shorts. felt around back and noticed that the tiny key pocket had come unzipped. my hotel room key and credit card were gone

the lifeguard monitoring the bottom of the slides said she’d come find me if she found anything, but the way she said it conveyed the impossibility of that actually happening

decided to ride the slide one last time just to see if my cards were swirling around prospector’s pan. didn’t manage to enjoy this trip down. just joyless sliding

family acted more alarmed about my loss of cards than expected. tried to downplay it. dad insinuated that I hadn’t adequately zipped the zipper on my shorts. people commiserated about having to cancel my credit card and update all my accounts. privately decided I wouldn’t bother. if the card wasn’t lost, surely it’d be damaged enough not to work anymore

my wife went to get me a new room key card, and then went back to the hotel room to lay down, leaving me in charge of my son. my sister went to ride more slides with teen cousin, leaving me in charge of her son. little cousin playtime was fun. love my nephew. he’s 3. he’s so tiny. he said he had to go potty, so the three of us waddled over to the bathroom in the cold hallway outside the entrance. asked him “pee or poo” and he didn’t answer. he pulled down his pants and tried to sit in the urinal. airlifted him to the throne. it took him longer than it takes my kid, but we were all patient, and he did good. after, we got dip’n dots from the concession window

I’ve since been monitoring my credit card activity online. nothing suspicious showing up. there was one big charge for an airbnb, but my wife said not to worry about it, it’s for a trip she’s taking. I’m not worried about it. don’t worry about it

Writing these felt especially daunting this month. Nevertheless, these are the books I read in September, 2022—

Leave Society Cookbook (Forever Magazine Pocket Bible 2) by Tao Lin

This was a fun and funny supplement to Leave Society that I received for being a Forever subscriber. I was impressed by the thematic cohesion, the design and material quality, and the humor within. It made me remember the infectiousness of some of Tao’s ideas from the novel and his interviews about it. I was more open to the influence of some than others, all of which seem to be full (if evolving) lifestyle commitments for Tao. As an addendum to the Leave Society review I didn’t write, I’ll say that the more open I become to the therapeutic benefits of stuff like cannabis and psychedelics for others, the more strongly I believe that my own puritanical tendencies are right for me. More relevant to this cookbook, reducing exposure to toxins etc. and eating natural foods seem smart, intuitive, and good. I haven’t read all of Tao’s autism essay yet, but I did watch the alien documentary he recommended, which struck me as pretty untrustworthy, though that isn’t to say I fault anyone for believing or enjoying it. I did recently for the first time in my life start drinking diet sodas. My child was also recently diagnosed with autism. Coincidence?

Our Last Year by Alan Rossi

I worked with Alan to edit and publish his essay on Leave Society for XRAY, and so was curious and receptive when he later sent me this PDF (out with Prototype in the UK). The domestic hyper-mundanity was an instant hook, like a depressed-but-still-loving Room Temperature by Nicholson Baker, fully and dutifully immersed in the procedural materiality of making a kid their meal, dreading the indefinite, infinite-feeling loops of a life lived just a half-step above complete precarity. It escalates into unnervingly realistic relationship difficulties and achieves profundity. The scenes of couples therapy in particular were visceral and harrowing and felt almost as if maybe not more effective than actually attending something like that in person. Tao’s blurb says that the book is “calming and healing,” which I at first took to be hyperbole but now do not. I have a vague sense that maybe not everyone will love this book and that I am in some ways close to its ideal reader, so I won’t say this full-throatedly, but rather somewhat self-consciously and with a whisper: _{I loved this book.} When Alan sent it to me, it didn’t yet have a US publisher. I hope he finds one!

Kanley Stubrick by Mike Kleine

Mike recently put a bunch of stuff up on a Bandcamp page and announced a sale, so I bought up everything I could. Spoonerisms are endlessly amusing to me, so this was the obvious entry point. I may be overasserting the prism of my affinities in making this comparison, but it was reminiscent of Mark Baumer grafted with Renee Gladman in its non-sequitur subversion of expectation at the sentence and subject levels, the passage of time, the deliberate vagueness and obfuscation that is somehow no less specific or precise. It’s a little silly but also aesthetically razor-sharp. The hapless pursuit of a missing person starts whimsical, turns nightmarish, and then returns somewhat inexplicably to normal life (or, I should say, “lyfe.”) I especially enjoyed the recurring gag about “watching a program,” where some bizarre/obscure/plausible subject is featured on TV, which brought some feeling of hope and redemption to an activity I usually (though no longer guiltily) think of as consumptive, passive entertainment.

In a Shallow Grave by James Purdy

Troy said to read this, so I did (along with everyone else.) It’s really good! You should just read Unity’s review. I like how the narrator’s peculiar manner of speaking is influenced by reading (or rather being read to) from an inherited library and occasionally makes it hard to situate in time (both narrative time and authorship time). That seems like a courageous decision to make as a writer. I ordered a copy and read a pirated ebook while waiting for it to arrive. Shipping took longer than expected, so I’ve postponed posting this until I could include the physical copy in the accompanying photo, which I’ve decided will give me an edge in my ill-advised and one-sided competition with Unity’s lovely pumpkin pic.

True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee by Abraham Riesman

I don’t know how I know Abraham, but I feel like I do. We’ve been online mutuals for a long time, and I feel like we probably met once at a gathering in Providence, but maybe I’m fabricating that shell of a memory. I enjoy their tweets about Judaism and Modest Mouse and, more recently, sexuality and gender expression, and am also mildly interested in the cultural phenomenon of comics, so I bought this book when it came out and then let it sit on the shelf for a while before recently deciding to just listen to the audiobook! I was amazed at how messy and soapy and sad Stan Lee’s life story is, and how under-the-radar the muddy truth of it is. The book’s treatment of plausible but unverifiable claims was exciting in the way that it interpreted them while allowing for the possibility that they’re true without swallowing them whole. It’s interesting to think about how to transparently deal with gossip, rumor, tall-tales, lies, “larger-than-life” and self-mythologizing true-life people as subjects and characters. I am eager to read (or listen) to Abraham’s forthcoming book about Vince McMahon, which I suspect will be full of equally unexpected delights and sorrows.

Little Engines Issue 7

I think it’s really cool that Adam Voith just mails these out to whoever wants one for free until they run out. Newsprint is in style! Aaron Burch’s art is fun, and Mike Nagel’s piece is on point, per usual. The rest was enjoyable too. It’s a great length for a lil publication!

Lungfish by Meghan Gilliss

I met Meghan a couple of years ago on the tiny island that (I believe) serves as the basis for the setting of this book. It was a magical day. This is a magical book! The isolating agony of being shackled to an addict was so well rendered, as was the feverish and consuming love for and protection of a child. It made me feel both fondness and rage. This book is more experimental than I anticipated it would be. I was delighted by its refusal to over-explain, its fragmentation, its flirtation with but ultimate rejection of a typical Freytag triangle narrative arc. The book was edited by Kendall Storey, who also edited Jordan Castro’s The Novelist, and I detected similar bits of sculpting influence. Great accomplishments all around.

Donald Goines by Calvin Westra

Donald Goines.

jk, I’ll say more. Calvin did a really good job! It’s clear how much care went into fleshing it out, shaping it, and sharpening it. This book is bizarre and funny and unsettling but also a little bit tender. I feel like Calvin lets us see his heart. The drug stuff made me queasy, and I think it was meant to. When it’s described, I can’t help but imagine slicing cuts in my own arms in order to shove bits of illicit clay into the wounds, or chewing glass on the hunch that it would feel good. I liked the status marker of receiving subsidized school lunches, and the recurring preoccupation with how people are or aren’t set up for “success” by being read to and fed breakfast as kids.

Bad Thoughts by Nada Alic

This collection opens super strong—the Miranda July comparison occurred to me before I registered that one of the blurbs says it—the voice is hyperaware, and the narrative impulses feel fresh. The first few stories are some of the best I’ve read recently. After a while, though, the high-functioning slacker ethic permeates the whole book, and the humor gets a little cynical, or glib, or ironical. There’s a level of confessional self-implication that seems almost like cope—well-calculated to avoid having to go even deeper. Huge talent here, obviously, though I’d have liked to see it wreak a little more havoc.