11/12: round-up
Hi & happy Friday!
Hope you all had a good week. I, for one, had a tiring week—so I’m grateful to have the weekend to sleep in (A.K.A. wake up at 7:30am rather than 7am).
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I read last week
Quotations from said texts
What I hope to read soon
Tweets (So many tweets!)
No, really: so many tweets. To read the whole newsletter, you’ll have to open this email in another window.
Housekeeping:
I have two new poems out in Southeast Review.
I have art on the cover for the newest Your Impossible Voice.
I’m (e-)tabling at the East Bay Alternative Book & Zine Fest! Since it’s online this year, anyone can participate, and you can find out more information here. That weekend, I’ll be offering major discounts on my zines but, if you want to buy one now, they’re always available here.
And, some other recent posts, in case you missed them:
What I read last week:
Reading the Gaps: On Women’s Nonfiction and Page Space, Amie Souza Reilly
“After Trans Studies,” Andrea Long Chu and Emmett Harsin Drager
“Yield: An Excerpt from a Memoir,” Jos Charles
“Calling Self-Indulgence: Names, Pronouns, Poems,” J De Leon
Our Deep Gossip: Conversations with Gay Writers on Poetry and Desire (Kazim Ali’s chapter)
“[When staggering down the runway wearing tartan over torn lace],” Valerie Wallace
Quotations from things I read:
The model of sex as being divided according to male and female is deeply related to, perhaps even patterned after, a model of a completely bifurcated race system of white and black. And so I start there as a way of thinking through the notion of biological sex as being constructed.
-C. Riley Snorton
I’m interested in thinking about how people, particularly black folks, make use of their gender, as a way to resist control.
-C. Riley Snorton
It seemed urgent that I resist the mainstreaming of queerness and sustain a more radical tradition, assimilation being a form of death.
-T. Fleischmann
I think it’s tempting to hold onto the idea of the homosexual as an outlaw figure, but for the most part gay people are completely bourgeois. There’s nothing oppositional about them, nothing revolutionary. We hold onto this idealized queer criminal as some form of alterity.
-Matias Viegener
Death is bigger than our theoretical or linguistic capacities to contain it.
-Matias Viegener
Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper…poetry has been the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women. A room of one’s own may be a necessity for writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter, and plenty of time.
-Audre Lorde
The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.
-Rebecca Solnit
Bitterness feels right to me as one of the primary critical affects of trans satire as we’re imagining it here—not cynicism, […] but real bitterness, the bitter disappointment of finding out the world is too small for all our desires, and especially the political ones. I know I’m bitter. I get the sense you are, too.
-Andrea Long Chu
I need to be clear here. I need to be clear that I have a car, a fixed address, a computer. That I am white and have access to so much. That I am a worker of the house, not a worker of the field. I speak for myself alone. No, not alone. I need to be clear—I was born amidst so much violence, so much hurt, hurt that benefits me, that traumatizes me, that benefits at times just as it traumatizes me. That I am this hurt. The cud and the swallow. That I am free.
-Jos Charles
I don’t know the difference between the body and its promise.
-Jos Charles
Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.
-Audre Lorde
Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.
-Audre Lorde
I am afraid of being seen. / I am afraid of being named.
-Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
I am a resistant writer; I always want to work against the grain of my own ease.
-Kazim Ali
We are, each of us, flawed creatures, aren’t we? We stumble, we fail, we make terrible mistakes, we think we learn important lessons and then we make the mistakes again. Beautiful flawed humans we are and in that divine.
-Kazim Ali
I’m just doing my best. I am […] a humble and small thing, easily confused, just hoping like mad to make something good of myself, to be a good son of humans and god. I imagine we are all like that.
-Kazim Ali
The body keeps its silence to protect itself.
-Kazim Ali
I’ve wrestled down god all my life in order to not suffocate. I can’t apologize for the fact that he came after me.
-Kazim Ali
What I hope to read soon:
How About Never? Anna Holmes
How I Found a Writing Cohort Without an MFA, Veronica Klash
Twitter Is The Worst Reader, Fonda Lee
In Search of the Gender-Neutral Singular Pronoun, LARB Learns From Stacey Waite
On Liking Women, Andrea Long Chu
Tweets:
Okay, I’m done. Have a great weekend!
-DB
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